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THE YOUNGER AMERICAN 
POETS 



THE 

YOUNGER AMERICAN 
POETS 

BY 

JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE 

ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
1904 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

NOV 1 1904 

Copyright fcntry/ 

CfcASS 6U 'xXc, No: 

/* o 60 & 

COPY B. 






\: 



Copyright, 1904, 
By Little, Brown, and Company. 



All rights reserved 



Published October, 1904 



THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U. S. A. 



To 
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON 

WHO HAS ENRICHED AMERICAN LITERATURE WITH HER SONG, 

AND MY LIFE WITH HER FRIENDSHIP, 

THESE STUDIES OF THE YOUNGER POETS 

ARE INSCRIBED 

WITH THE WARM AFFECTION OF 

JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE 



FOREWORD 

TO attempt, in one volume, to cover the 
entire field of present-day poetry in 
America, will be recognized the more 
readily as impossible when one reflects that in 
Mr. Stedman's American Anthology over five 
hundred poets are represented, of whom the 
greater number are still living and singing. 

One may scarcely hope, then, in the space 
of one volume, to include more than a repre- 
sentative group, even when confining his study 
to the work of the younger poets, for within 
this class would fall the larger contingent 
named above. It has therefore been necessary 
to follow a general, though not arbitrary, stand- 
ard of chronology, of which the most feasible 
seemed that adopted by Mr. Archer in his ad- 
mirable study of the English " Poets of the 
Younger Generation," — the including only of 
such as have been born within the last half- 
century, and whose place is still in the making. 
The few remaining poets whose art has long 
since denned itself, such as Mr. Aldrich, Mr. 



Vlll 



Foreword 



Stedman, and Mrs. Moulton, need no further 
interpretation ; nor does the long-acknowledged 
work of Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, nor that 
of James Whitcomb Riley, whose final criticism 
has been pronounced in every heart and at 
every hearth. 

The work of Mr. Edwin Markham, the poet 
of democracy, whose fraternal songs embcdy 
many of the latter-day ideals, and that of John 
B. Tabb, the lapidary of modern verse, v^ho 
cuts with infinite care his delicate camecs of 
thought, were also beyond the chronological 
scheme of the volume. Nor of those who fell 
within its scope could a selection be made that 
would not seem to some invidious, since it 
must chance among so great a number that 
many would be omitted who should, with equal 
right, have been included ; it returns, therefore, 
to the earlier statement, that one must confine 
himself to a representative group, with whose 
work he chance to be most familiar, and upon 
which he has, therefore, the truer claim to 
speak. 

It seemed, also, that the volume would have 
more value if it gave to a smaller number such 
a study as would differentiate and define their 
work, rather than to a larger group the passing 
comment of a few paragraphs. It was a great 



Foreword 



IX 



regret, however, that circumstances incident 
to the copyrights prevented me from including 
the admirable work of William Vaughn Moody, 
which reveals by its breadth, penetration, and 
purpose, the thinker and not the dreamer. In- 
deed, Mr. Moody's work, in its vitality of touch, 
fine imagination, and spiritual idealism, proves 
not only the creative poet but one to whom the 
nobler offices of Art have been entrusted, and 
the critic given to inquiring why the former 
tinier were better than these may well keep his 
eye upon the work of Mr. Moody. 

It was also a regret that those inexorable 
arbiters, space and time, deprived me of the 
privilege of including the strongly individual 
work of Helen Gray Cone; the artistic, thought- 
ful verse of Anna Hempstead Branch ; the 
sincere ana sympathetic song of Virginia 
Woodward Cloud ; the spiritual verse of Lilian 
Whiting, with its interpretation of the higher 
imports ; the heartening, characteristic notes of 
Theodosia Garrison ; and the recently issued 
poems of Josephine Dodge Daskam, which 
prove beyond peradventure that the Muses, 
too, were at her christening, — indeed, the 
"Songs of Iseult Deserted," which form a 
group in her volume, are lyrics worthy of any 
hand. 



X 



Foreword 



Had it been possible in the space at com- 
mand, I should also have had pleasure in con- 
sidering the work of Frank Dempster Sherman, 
who is not only an accomplished lyrist, but who 
has divined the heart of the child and set it to 
music; the cheer-giving songs of Frank L. 
Stanton, fledged with the Southland sunshine 
and melody ; and the verse-stories of Holman 
F. Day, bringing from the pines of Maine their 
pungent aroma of humor and pathos. Mr. Day 
covers an individual field, representing such 
phases of New England life as have been little 
celebrated hitherto, even by writers of fiction. 
He is familiar with every corner of Maine from 
the mountains to the sea, and writes of humanity 
in the concrete, sketching his types equally from 
the lumber camp or from the sailors and fisher- 
men of the shore. In his latest volume they 
are drawn from the " Kin o' Ktaadn," and hold 
their way throughout its pages with a reality 
provoking both laughter and tears ; indeed, one 
must seek far to find a keener humor, or one 
more infectious, than that of Mr. Day, or a 
more sympathetic penetration into the pathos 
of life. The heart is the book of his reading, 
and, in turn, the heart is the book of his 
writing. 

There is no attempt in these studies of the 



CONTENTS 

Page 

Foreword vii 

I. Richard Hovey i 

- II. LlZETTE WOODWORTH REESE ... 27 

III. Bliss Carman 46 

IV. Louise Imogen Guiney 75 

V. George E. Santa yana 94 

VI. Josephine Preston Peabody . . . no 

VII. Charles G. D. Roberts .... 132 

VIII. Edith M. Thomas 151 

.. IX. Madison Casein 177 

X. George E. Woodberry 196 

XI. Frederic Lawrence Knowles . .212 

XII. Alice Brown 235 

XIII. Richard Burton 248 

XIV. Clinton Scollard ...... 269 

XV. Mary McNeil Fenollosa .... 290 

XVI. RlDGELY TORRENCE 299 

XVII. Gertrude Hall 315 

XVIII. Arthur Upson 325 

Biographical Index 347 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Richard Hovey Frontispiece 

Lizette Woodworth Reese .... Facing page 2 8 

Bliss Carman " "48 

Louise Imogen Guiney " " 76 

Josephine Preston Peabody .... " "112 

Charles G. D. Roberts " "134 

Madison Cawein " "178 

George E. Woodberry " "198 

Frederic Lawrence Knowles ... " "214 

Alice Brown " " 236 

Richard Burton ....... « "250 

Clinton Scollard " "270 

Mary McNeil Fenollosa .... " "292 

rldgely torrence " " 3oo 



The 

Younger American Poets 

i 

RICHARD HOVEY 

RICHARD HOVEY was a poet of con- 
victions rather than of fancies, in which 
w regard he overtopped many of his 
contemporaries who were content to be "en- 
amored architects of airy rhyme." Hovey was 
himself a skilful architect of rhyme, an im- 
aginative weaver of fancy ; but these were not 
ends, he does not stand primarily for them. 
He stands for comradeship ; for taking vows 
of one's own soul ; for alliance with the shap- 
ing spirit of things ; for a sane, wholesome, 
lusty manhood; a hearty, confident surrender 
to life. 

He is the poet of positivism, virile, objective, 
and personal to a Whitmanesque degree, and 
answers to many of the qualifications laid 
down by Whitman for the testing of an 
American poet. His performance is eminently 



2 The Younger American Poets 

of the sort to " face the open fields and the 
seaside; " it does " absorb into one;" it "ani- 
mates to life," and it is of the people. It 
answers also to the query, " Have you vivified 
yourself from the maternity of these States ? " 
for Hovey was an American of the Americans, 
and his patriotic poems are instinct with 
national pride, though one may dissent from 
certain of his opinions upon war. 

Hovey, to the degree of his development 
when his hand was stayed, was a finely balanced 
man and artist. The purely romantic motives 
which form the entire basis, for example, of 
Stephen Phillips' work, and thus render him 
a poet of the cultured classes and not of the 
people, were foreign to the spirit of Hovey. 
He, too, was recasting in dramatic form some 
of beauty's imperishable traditions ; but this 
was only one phase of his art, it did not cause 
him to approach his own time with less of 
sympathy; and while he had not yet come 
deeply into the prophet gifts of song, their 
potency was upon him, and in the Odes, which 
contain some of his strongest writing, his pas- 
sion for brotherhood, for development through 
comradeship, finds splendid expression. In the 
best known of his odes, " Spring," occurs this 
stirring symbol: 






Richard Hovey 3 

For surely in the blind deep-buried roots 
Of all men's souls to-day 
A secret quiver shoots. 

• ••••• 

The darkness in us is aware 

Of something potent burning through the earth, 

Of something vital in the procreant air. 

It is in this ode, with the exception of his 
visioning of " Night " in Last Songs from Vag- 
abondia, that the influence of Whitman upon 
Hovey comes out most prominently; that is, 
the influence of manner. The really vital in- 
fluence is one much less easily demonstrated, 
but no less apparent to a student of both 
poets. It is not of the sort, however, to detract 
from the originality of Hovey, but rather an 
intensifying of his characteristics, a focalizing 
of his powers, and is in accordance with Whit- 
man's declaration that 

" He most honors my style 
Who learns under it to destroy the teacher." 

Hovey's own nature was so individual that he 
rarely failed to destroy the teacher, or he was 
perhaps unconscious of having one ; but in 
the opening lines of the ode in question the 
Whitman note is unmistakable: 

I said in my heart, " I am sick of four walls and a ceiling. 
I have need of the sky. 



4 The Younger American Poets 

I have business with the grass. 

I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling, 

Lone and high, 

And the slow clouds go by. 

• ••••• 

Spring, like a huntsman's boy, 

Halloos along the hillsides and unhoods 

The falcon in my will. 

The dogwood calls me, and the sudden thrill 

That breaks in apple blooms down country roads 

Plucks me by the sleeve and nudges me away. 

The sap is in the boles to-day, 

And in my veins a pulse that yearns and goads." 

Could volumes of conventional nature poetry 
set one a-tingle like this ? The crowning ex- 
cellence of Hovey's nature poems is that they 
are never reports, they do not describe with 
far-sought imagery, but are as personal as a 
poem of love or other emotion. Such passion- 
ate surrender, such intimate delight as finds 
expression, for example, in " The Faun," could 
scarcely be more communicative and direct. 
It becomes at once our own mood, an inter- 
change which is the test of art: 

. . . And I plunge in the wood, and the swift soul cleaves 
Through the swirl and the flow of the leaves, 
As a swimmer stands with his white limbs bare to the sun 
For the space that a breath is held, and drops in the sea ; 
And the undulant woodland folds round me, intimate, fluct- 
uant, free, 



Richard Hovey 5 

Like the clasp and the cling of waters, and the reach and 

the effort is done ; — 
There is only the glory of living, exultant to be. 

In such words as these one loses thought of 
the merely picturesque, their infection takes 
hold upon him, particularly in that line befit- 
ting the forest spirit as a garment, in which 

The undulant woodland folds round me, intimate, fluctuant, 
free, — 

a line wherein the idea, feeling, movement, and 
diction are wholly at one. It is impossible for 
Richard Hovey to be aloof and analytical in 
any phase of his work, and when he writes of 
nature it is as the comrade to whom she 
is a mystic personality. A stanza of " The 
Faun " illustrates this ; still in the wood, he 
asks: 

Oh, what is it breathes in the air ? 
Oh, what is it touches my cheek? 
There 's a sense of a presence that lurks in the branches. 

But where ? 
Is it far, is it far to seek? 

The first two collections of the Vagabondia 
books contain Hovey's most spontaneous na- 
ture verse ; they have also some of the lyrics by 
which he will be known when such a rollicking 
stave as " Barney McGee," at which one laughs 



6 The Younger American Poets 

as a boyish exuberance, is forgotten. The 
quips of rhyme and fancy that enliven the 
pages of the earlier volumes give place, in 
the Last Songs, to a note of seriousness and 
artistic purpose which sets the collection to an 
entirely different key; not that the work is 
uniformly superior to that of the former songs, 
but it is more earnest in tone ; dawn is giving 
place to noon. 

From the second collection may be cited one 
of the lyric inspirations that sometimes came to 
Hovey, all warmth and color, as if fashioned 
complete in a thought. It is called " A Sea 
Gypsy," and the first of its quatrains, though 
perhaps not more than the others, has a haunting 
charm : 

I am fevered with the sunset, 

I am fretful with the bay, 
For the wander-thirst is on me 

And my soul is in Cathay. 

There 's a schooner in the offing, 
With her topsails shot with fire, 

And my heart has gone aboard her 
For the Islands of Desire. 

I must forth again to-morrow ! 

With the sunset I must be 
Hull down on the trail of rapture 

In the wonder of the sea. 



Richard Hovey 7 

Aside from the dramas, and the noble elegy, 
"Seaward," Hovey 's most representative work 
is found in his collection, Along the Trail, 
which opens with a group of battle-hymns 
inspired by the Spanish-American war. With 
the exception of " Unmanifest Destiny," and oc- 
casional trumpet notes from the poem called 
11 Bugles," these battle-songs are more or less 
perfunctory, nor are they ethically the utter- 
ance of a prophet. There is the old assump- 
tion that because war has ever been, it ever 
will be ; that because the sword has been the 
instrument of progress in past world-crises, it is 
the divinely chosen arbiter. There is nothing 
of that development of man that shall find a 
higher way, no visioning of a world-standard 
to which nations shall conform ; it is rather 
the celebration of brawn, as in the sonnet 
" America." The jubilant note of his call of the 
11 Bugles," however, thrills with passionate pride 
in his country as the deliverer of the weak, 
for the ultimate idea in Hovey's mind was 
his country's altruism ; but, as a whole, the 
battle-songs lack the larger vision and are un- 
equal in workmanship, falling constantly into 
the commonplace from some flight of lyric 
beauty. The best of them, and a worthy 
best, both in conception and in its dignified 



8 The Younger American Poets 

simplicity, is " Unmanifest Destiny," which 
follows : 

To what new fates, my country, far 

And unforeseen of foe or friend, 
Beneath what unexpected star, 

Compelled to what unchosen end, 

Across the sea that knows no beach 

The Admiral of Nations guides 
Thy blind obedient keels to reach 

The harbor where thy future rides ! 

The guns that spoke at Lexington 

Knew not that God was planning then 

The trumpet word of Jefferson 
To bugle forth the rights of men. 

To them that wept and cursed Bull Run, 
What was it but despair and shame ? 

Who saw behind the cloud the sun ? 
Who knew that God was in the flame ? 

Had not defeat upon defeat, 

Disaster on disaster come, 
The slave's emancipated feet 

Had never marched behind the drum. 

There is a Hand that bends our deeds 
To mightier issues than we planned, 

Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds, 
My country, serves Its dark command. 

I do not know beneath what sky 
Nor on what seas shall be thy fate ; 

I only know it shall be high, 
I only know it shall be great. 



Richard Hovey 9 

Hovey's themes are widely diverse, but they 
are always of the essential purports. He seems 
not only integral with nature, but integral with 
man in his ardor of sympathy for his fellows, 
and the swift understanding of all that makes 
for achievement or defeat. He had the splen- 
did nonchalance that met everything with 
confident ease, and made his relation to life 
like that of an athlete trained to prevail. Not 
to be servile, not to be negative, not to be 
vague, — these are some of the notes of his 
stirring song. Even in love there is a char- 
acteristic dash and verve, a celebration of com- 
radeship as the keynote of the relation, that 
makes it possible for him to write this sonnet, 
so refreshing and wholesome, and so far re- 
moved from the mawkish or effeminate : 

When I am standing on a mountain crest, 
Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray, 
My love of you leaps foaming in my breast, 
Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray ; 
My heart bounds with the horses of the sea, 
And plunges in the wild ride of the night, 
Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee 
That rides out Fate and welcomes gods to fight. 
Ho, love, I laugh aloud for love of you, 
Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather, — 
No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew, 
But hale and hardy as the highland heather, 



io The Younger American Poets 

Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills, 
Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills. 

And that other sonnet, " Faith and Fate," with 
its Valkyr spirit, and its words like ringing 
hoofbeats : 

To horse, my dear, and out into the night ! 

Stirrup and saddle and away, away ! 
Into the darkness, into the affright, 

Into the unknown on our trackless way ! 

And closing with one of his finest lines — 

East, to the dawn, or west or south or north ! 
Loose rein upon the neck of Fate — and forth / 

What valor in that line — " Loose rein upon 
the neck of Fate — and forth ! " This is the 
typical mood, but I cannot refrain, before con- 
sidering the last phase of his work, the dramas, 
from quoting another sonnet in another mood, 
because of its beauty and its revelation of the 
spiritual side of his nature: 

My love for thee doth take me unaware, 

When most with lesser things my brain is wrought, 
As in some nimble interchange of thought 

The silence enters, and the talkers stare. 

Suddenly I am still and thou art there, 
A viewless visitant and unbesought, 
And all my thinking trembles into nought, 

And all my being opens like a prayer. 



Richard Hovey n 

Thou art the lifted Chalice in my soul, 

And I a dim church at the thought of thee ; 
Brief be the moment, but the mass is said, 
The benediction like an aureole 

Is on my spirit, and shuddering through me 
A rapture like the rapture of the dead. 

" The Quest of Merlin," Hovey 's first incur- 
sion into drama, and indeed one of his earliest 
works, having been issued in 1891, is most 
illustrative of his defects and least of his dis- 
tinctions. It is unnecessary to the subsequent 
dramas, though serving as an introduction to 
them, and has in itself very little constructive 
congruity. In the songs of the fairies, the 
dryads, the maenads, there is often a delicate 
airy beauty ; but the metrical lapses throughout 
the drama are so frequent as to detract from 
one's pleasure in the verse. This criticism is 
much less apposite to the subsequent works 
of the cycle. 

Hovey's Arthurian dramas must be judged 
by the manner rather than motif, by the situa- 
tions through which he develops the well-known 
story, and the dramatic beauty and passion of 
the dialogue, since the theme is his only as 
he makes it his by the art of his adaptation. 
He has given us the Arthur of Malory, and 
not of Tennyson, the Arthur of a certain early 



12 The Younger American Poets 

intrigue with Morgance, the Queen of Orkney, 
outlived in all save its effect, that of bitterness 
and envy cherished by her against the young 
Queen Guinevere, and made use of as one of 
the motives of the drama. 

While Tennyson's Arthur, until the final 
great scene with Guinevere in the convent, 
and Bedivere by the lake, has a lay-figure per- 
sonality, placidly correct, but unconvincing, — 
in these scenes, and in the general ideal of the 
Round Table, as developed by Tennyson, there 
is such profound spiritual beauty that Arthur 
has come to dwell in a nebulous upper air, as 
of the gods. It is a shock, then, to see him 
brought down to earth, as he is in Hovey's 
dramas. However, the lapses are but referred 
to as incidental to the plot, not occurring during 
its action, and Arthur becomes to us a human, 
magnanimous personality, commanding sym- 
pathy, if he does not dominate the imagination 
as does Tennyson's hero. The handicap under 
which any poet labors who makes use of these 
legends, even though vitalizing them with a 
new touch, and approaching them from a new 
standpoint, is that the Tennyson touch, the 
Tennyson standpoint, has so impressed itself 
upon the memory that comparison is inev- 
itable. 



Richard Hovey 13 

The fateful passion of Lancelot and Guine- 
vere is enveloped by Tennyson in a spiritual 
atmosphere ; but in the dramas of Hovey, while 
delicately approached, it lacks that elevation by 
which alone it lives as a soul-tragedy, and not 
as an intrigue. There is, indeed, a strife for 
loyalty on the part of Lancelot, when he re- 
turns from a chivalrous quest and learns that 
the King's bride is his unknown Lady of the 
Hills ; but it is soon overborne by Galahault's 
assurance that Arthur is to Guinevere — 

A mere indifferent, covenanted thing, 
and that she 

Is as virgin of the thought of love 
As winter is of flowers. 

Ere this declaration, Lancelot, in conflict with 
himself, had exclaimed : 

Oh, Galahault, for love of my good name, 
Pluck out your sword and kill me, for I see 
Whate'er I do it will be violence — 
To soul or body, others or myself ! 

But to Galahault's subtle arguments he 
opposes an ever-weakening will, and seeing the 
Queen walking in the garden, exquisite in 
beauty, 



14 The Younger American Poets 

As if a rose grew on a lily's stem, 

So blending passionate life and stately mien, — 

he is persuaded to seek ner, and, ere the close 
of the interview, half confessions have orbed to 
full acknowledgment by each. The scene is 
artistically handled, especially in the ingenu- 
ous simplicity of Guinevere. 

Hovey occasionally makes the mistake of 
robbing some vital utterance of its dramatic 
value by interlarding it with ornament. True 
emotion is not literary, and Guinevere, meeting 
Lancelot alone at the lodge of Galahault, for 
the first time after their mutual confession, hav- 
ing come hither disguised and by a perilous 
course, would scarcely have chosen these deco- 
rative words : 

Oh, do not jar with speech 

This perfect chord of silence ! — Nay, there needs 
Thy throat's deep music. Let thy lips drop words 
Like pearls between thy kisses ; 

and Lancelot, of the overmastering passion, 
would scarcely have babbled this reply: 

Thy speech breaks 
Against the interruption of my lips 
Like the low laughter of a summer brook 
Over perpetual pebbles. 



Richard Hovey 15 

But when the crisis of the play is reached, 
when the court is rife with rumors of the 
Queen's disloyalty, and Lancelot and Guinevere, 
under imminent shadow of exposure, meet by 
chance in the throne room, — there is drawn a 
vital, moving picture, one whose art lies in 
revealing the swift transition from impulse 
to impulse through which one passes when 
making great decisions. First, the high light is 
thrown upon the stronger side of Guinevere, in 
such meditative passages as these, tinged with 
a melancholy beauty: 

We have had a radiant dream ; we have beheld 
The trellises and temples of the South, 
And wandered in the vineyards of the Sun : — 
'Tis morning now; the vision fades away 
And we must face the barren norland hills. 

Lancelot. And must this be? 

Guinevere. Nay, Lancelot, it is. 

How shall we stand alone against the world ? 

Lancelot. More lonely in it than against ! 
What's the world to us? 

Guinevere. The place in which we live. 

We cannot slip it from us like a garment, 
For it is like the air — if we should flee 
To the remotest steppes of Tartary, 
Arabia, or the sources of the Nile, — 
It still is there, nor can it be eluded 
Save in the airless emptiness of death. 

And fortressed with resolve, she speaks of war, 



i6 The Younger American Poets 

of rending the kingdom, of violating friend- 
ships, of desecrating the family bond, to all of 
which Lancelot opposes his own desires : 

And I — 
I, too, defend it when it is a family, 
As I would kneel before the sacred Host 
When through the still aisles sounds the sacring bell ; 
But if a jester strutted through the forms 
And turned the holy Mass into a mock, 
Would I still kneel, or would I rise in anger 
And make an end of that foul mimicry ? 

This but adds strength to Guinevere's argu- 
ment, 

Believest thou, then, the power of the Church? 
The Church would give our love an ugly name. 

Lancelot. Faith, I believe, and I do not believe. 
The shocks of life oft startle us to thought, 
Rouse us from acquiescence and reveal 
That what we took for credence was but custom. 

Guinevere. You are Arthur's friend, your love — 
Stands this within the honor of your friendship ? 

Lancelot. Mother of God — have you no pity? 

Guinevere. I would 

I could be pitiful, and yet do right. 
Alas, how heavy — your tears move me more 
Than all — (what am I saying? Dare I trust 
So faint a heart ? I must make turning back 
Impossible) ; 

and with a final resolve she adds: 



Richard Hovey 17 

But know the worst ! I jested — 
I — God ! — I do not love you. Go ! 'T was all 
Mockery — wanton cruelty — what you will — lechery ! — 
I — 

(Lancelot looks at her dumbly, then slowly turns to go. 
As he draws aside the cicrtain of the doorway — ) 

Guinevere. Lancelot ! 

Lancelot. What does the Queen desire? 

Guinevere. Oh, no, I am not the Queen — I am 
Your wife ! 

Take me away with you ! Let me not lie 
To you, of all — my whole life is a lie, 
To one, at least, let it be truth. I — I — 

Lancelot, do you not understand? 

1 love you — Oh, I cannot let you go ! 

This swift change of front, this weakening, 
this inconsistency, is yet so human, so subtly 
true to life, under such a phase of it, that the 
entire scene vibrates with emotion which gathers 
force in the declaration of Guinevere : 

Love, I will fly with thee where'er thou wilt ! 

and reaches its climax in the sudden strength 
with which Lancelot meets the Queen's weak- 
ness. During her pleading that he should 
leave her, his selfish wish had been uppermost ; 
but her weakness recalls him to himself and 
evokes his latent loyalty to the King: 

Speak not of flight ; I have played him 
False — the King, my friend. 

2 



18 The Younger American Poets 

I ne'er can wipe that smirch away. 
At least I will not add a second shame 
And blazon out the insult to the world. 

And Guinevere, casting about for her own justi- 
fication, replies : 

What I have given thee was ne'er another's. 
How has another, then, been wronged? 

To which Lancelot : 

What 's done 
Is done, nor right nor wrong, as help me, Heaven, 
Would I undo it if I could. But more 
I will not do. I will not be the Brutus 
To stab with mine own hand my dearest friend. 
It must suffice me that you love me, sweet, 
And sometime, somewhere, somehow must be mine. 
I know not — it may be in some dim land 
Beyond the shadows, where the King himself, 
Still calling me his friend, shall place your hand 
In my hand, saying, " She was always thine." 

No surplusage, no interposition of the merely 
literary, cumbers this scene, which immediately 
precedes the final one, in which Lancelot and 
the Queen are publicly accused before the 
King, sitting with Guinevere beside him on 
the throne. 

The opportunity for a great dramatic effect 
is obvious; but through the magnanimity of 
Arthur, in waiving the impeachment, and exon- 



Richard Hovey 19 

e rating from suspicion the Queen and Lancelot, 
the effect is not of the clash and din order, in 
fact, it is anti-climax in action, the real climax 
being a spiritual one whose subtlety would be 
lost on the average audience. 

Lancelot (half aside, partly to Guinevere and 
partly to himself): 

Be less kingly, Arthur, 

Or you will split my heart — not with remorse — 

No, not remorse, only eternal pain ! 

Why, so the damned are ! 

Guinevere (half apart): 

To the souls in hell 
It is at least permitted to cry out. 

Whatever one may think of the ethical side of 
the play as wrought out by Hovey, there is no 
question of its human element. As a whole, 
" The Marriage of Guenevere " leaves upon 
one a more concrete and vital impression than 
do the other dramas of the cycle, though it 
has less of action and intricacy of plot than 
the succeeding one, " The Birth of Galahad," 
and would probably, for stage purposes, be less 
effective. 

The action of the latter play takes place 
chiefly with Arthur's army occupied in the siege 
of Rome, and unfolds an ingenious plot, turn- 



20 The Younger American Poets 

ing upon the capture of Dagonet, the Queen's 
jester, who has been sent with a letter to Lance- 
lot, informing him of the birth of his son, and 
announcing that Guinevere, having left the 
child with her friend, the Princess Ylen, had 
set out to join the army. The Romans at once 
conceive the plan of holding Dagonet ; cap- 
turing the Queen for the palace of Caesar ; and 
giving to Lancelot the alternative of forsaking 
Arthur, placing himself at the head of the 
army and becoming tributary king of Britain, 
with Guinevere as his queen ; or of being pub- 
licly dishonored by the conveyance to Arthur 
of the incriminating letter. All of which was 
artfully planned, and might have been executed 
as artfully, had not Dagonet, the jester, in an 
act of jugglery, stolen the Emperor's cloak and 
escaped, and, in the guise of a scrivener, at- 
tached himself to the service of a young poet 
of Caesar's household. 

Guinevere is captured by the Romans, and after 
many unsuccessful machinations on Caesar's part 
to subdue her to his will, and on the part of his 
advisers to win Lancelot to their ends, the let- 
ter, which may, according to the law of Britain, 
bring death to the Queen and banishment to 
Lancelot, is given to Dagonet to copy for Caesar, 
and is burned by the jester with the taper given 



Richard Hovey 21 

him to heat the waxen tablet. Then comes 
on apace the sacking of Rome by Arthur ; the 
taking of the city; the rescue of Guinevere 
by Lancelot; the slaying of Caesar and the 
crowning of Arthur as Emperor of Rome 
with Guinevere as Empress. The scene closes 
with the entrance of a messenger with letters 
from Merlin, to Arthur and Guinevere, scan- 
ning which the Queen says apart to Lance- 
lot: 

All 's well with him. 

Thus ends the drama, again with no suspicion 
on the part of Arthur that his faith has been 
betrayed, and with no remorse on the part of 
Guinevere at having betrayed it, only increas- 
ing joy in the love of Lancelot. It is Lancelot 
himself who has the conflict, and in his charac- 
ter lies the strength of the drama. 

It is evident that Hovey intended to create 
a flesh-and-blood Arthur, to eliminate the sanc- 
timonious and retain the ideal ; but the task 
proved too difficult, and after opening the 
reader's eyes to the human weaknesses of the 
King, thereby inflicting a shock, he returns to 
the other extreme, lifts him again into upper 
air, and leaves him abstract and unconvincing. 
Lancelot, on the contrary, if too palpably human 



22 The Younger American Poets 

at the start, grows into a more spiritual ideal, 
and when for the first time he meets Guinevere 
transfigured with maternal joy, he greets her 
with these exquisite words : 

How great a mystery you seem to me 

I cannot tell. You seem to have become 

One with the tides and night and the unknown. 

My child . . . your child . . . whence come? By 

What strange forge 

Wrought of ourselves and dreams and the great deep 

Into a life ? I feel as if I stood 

Where God had passed by, leaving all the place 

Aflame with him. 

And again he says, 

The strangeness is 

That I, who have not borne him, am aware, 

I, too, of intimacy with his soul. 

The dramas abound in quotable passages, nor 
are they lacking in those that make the judicious 
grieve. The work is unequal ; but as a whole 
it lives in the imagination, and remains in the 
memory, especially " The Marriage of Guene- 
vere," in that twilight of the mind where dwell 
all mystic shapes of hapless lovers. 

The last of the dramatic cycle, " The Masque 
of Taliesin," is regarded by most of Mr. Hovey's 
critics as the high-water mark of his verse, and 
it has certainly some of the purest song of his 



Richard Hovey 23 

pen, and profoundest in thought and concep- 
tion ; but it has also passages of unresolved 
metaphysics, whose place, unless the poet had 
the patience to shape them to a finer issue, 
should be in a Greek philosophy. 

The Masque turns upon the quest of the 
Graal by Percival, and is in three scenes, or 
movements, set in the forest of Broceliande, 
Helicon, and the Chapel of the Graal. It intro- 
duces the Muses, Merlin, Apollo, Nimue, King 
Evelac, guardian of the Graal, and lesser mortals 
and deities, but chief in interest, Taliesin, a 
bard, through whom are spoken the finest pas- 
sages of the play. As the work is cast in the 
form of a Masque, to obviate the need of adher- 
ing to a strict dramatic structure, one may dis- 
pense with a summary of its slight plot, and 
look, instead, at the verse. 

The passages spoken by Apollo to Taliesin, 
in other words, Inspiration defining itself to the 
poet, are full of glowing thought : 

Greaten thyself to the end, I am he for whose breath thou 

art greatened ; 
Perfect thy speech to a god's, I am he for whom speech is 

made perfect ; 
And my voice in the hush of thy heart is the voice of the 

tides of the worlds. 
Thou shalt know it is I when I speak, as the foot knows the 

rock that it treads on, 



24 The Younger American Poets 

As the sea knows the moon, as the sap knows the place of 

the sun in the heavens, 
As the cloud knows the cloud it must meet and embrace 

with caresses of lightning. 
When thou hearest my voice, thou art one with the hurl of 

the stars through the void, 
One with the shout of the sea and the stampede of droves 

of the wind, 
One with the coursers of Time and the grip of God's hand 

on their harness ; 
And the powers of the night and the grave shall avail not to 

stand in thy path. 

Genius and its invincible assurance could 
scarcely be defined better than in this passage. 
The Masque contains a litany spoken by 
King Evelac, and responded to by the chor- 
isters at the Chapel of Graal, which is one of 
its achievements, in point of beauty, though 
too long to quote, and lyrics of great delicacy 
are scattered throughout the work; but in 
the more spiritual passages, spoken chiefly by 
Taliesin, one gets the finer quality of the verse, 
as in this noble query addressed to Uriel, the 
angel who holds the flaming sword before the 
Graal : 

Thou who beholdest God continually, 
Doth not his light shine even on the blind 
Who feel the flood they lack the sense to see? 
The lark that seeks him in the summer sky 
Finds there the great blue mirror of his soul ; 



Richard Hovey 25 



Winged with the dumb need of he knows not what, 

He finds the mute speech of he knows not whom. 

Is not the wide air, after the cocoon, 

As much God as the moth-soul can receive? 

Doth not God give the child within the womb 

Some guess to set him groping for the world, 

Some blurred reflection answering his desire ? 

We, shut in this blue womb of doming sky, 

Guess and grope dimly for the vast of God, 

And, eyeless, through some vague, less perfect sense, 

Strive for a sign of what it is to see. 



'S 1 



Had one space to follow Mr. Hovey 's phi- 
losophy in the more metaphysical passages, 
though fashioned less artistically, the individ- 
uality of his thought in its subtler and more 
speculative phases would be revealed, but to 
trace it adequately one must needs have the 
volume before him, rather than such extracts as 
may be given in a brief study. I must there- 
fore, in taking leave of his work, content myself 
with citing the exultant lines with which the 
volume closes, the splendid death-song lifting 
one on the wave of its ecstatic feeling: 

Unaware as the air of the light that fills full all its girth, 
Yet crowds not an atom of air from its place to make way ; 

Growing from splendor to splendor, from birth to birth, 
As day to the rose of dawn from the earlier gray ; 

As day from the sunrise gold to the luminous mirth 

Of morning, and brighter and brighter, till noon shall be ; 



26 The Younger American Poets 

Intense as the cling of the sun to the lips of the earth, 
And cool as the call of a wind on the still of the sea, 

Joy, joy, joy in the height and the deep ; 

Joy like the joy of a leaf that unfolds to the sun ; 
Joy like the joy of a child in the borders of sleep ; 

Joy like the joy of a multitude thrilled into one. 

Stir in the dark of the stars unborn that desire 

Only the thrill of a wild, dumb force set free, 
Yearn of the burning heart of the world on fire 

For life and birth and battle and wind and sea, 
Groping of life after love till the spirit aspire, 

Into Divinity ever transmuting the clod, 
Higher and higher and higher and higher and higher 

Out of the Nothingness world without end into God. 

Man from the blindness attaining the -succor of sight, 

God from his glory descends to the shape we can see ; 
Life, like a moon, is a radiant pearl in the night 

Thrilled with his beauty to beacon o'er forest and sea ; 
Life, like a sacrifice laid on the altar, delight 

Kindles as flame from the air to be fire at its core ! 
Joy, joy, joy in the deep and the height ! 

Joy in the holiest, joy evermore, evermore ! 



II 

LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE 

MISS LIZETTE WOODWORTH 
REESE is an Elizabethan, not by 
affectation, but by temperament. 
Sidney and Lovelace and Herrick and Mar- 
lowe are her contemporaries, though she moves 
among them as a gray-robed figure among gay 
cavaliers and knights, so restrained is her 
mood, so delicate in its withholding. 

Her first collection is aptly named, A 
Handful of Lavender, for the fragrance of 
the elder time pervades it impalpably, as the 
scent of lavender makes sweet the linen of 
some treasured chest. How Miss Reese has 
been able, in the hurly-burly of American life, 
to find some indesecrate corner, some daffo- 
diled garden-close, holding always the quiet 
and the glint of sunshine out of which these 
songs have come, is an enigma w r orth a 
poet's solving. She is a Southern woman, 
which may furnish some clew to the repose of 
her work. There is time down there to ripen, 
to let life have its own way of enrichment with 



28 The Younger American Poets 

one. She has been content to publish three 
books of verse — although the first is now in- 
corporated with the second — in the interval 
in which our Northern poets would have pro- 
duced a half-dozen ; nor does she much con- 
cern herself, when once the captive melodies 
are freed, as to their flight. She knows there 
are magnetic breezes in the common air, 
charmed winds that blow unerringly, and in 
whose upper currents song's wings are guided, 
as the carrier-doves', to their appointed goal. 

There is a delicate harmony between Miss 
Reese's poems and their number, a nicety of 
adjustment between quality and quantity, that 
bespeaks the artist. She has the critic's gift of 
appraising her own work before it leaves her 
hand, and thus forestalls much of the criticism 
that might otherwise attend it. The faculty 
of self-analysis would be a safety-valve to 
the high-pressure speed at which most litera- 
ture of to-day is produced — but, alas, the few 
that employ it ! " Open the throttle and let it 
drive ! " is the popular injunction to the genius 
within, and wherever it drives, one is expected 
to follow. How refreshing it is, then, to come 
upon work with calm upon it! — work that 
came out of time, culture, and artist-love, and 
trusts its appreciation to the same standards. 



Lizette Woodworth Reese 29 

Miss Reese's verse shows constant affinity 
with Herrick, though it is rarely so blithe. It 
has the singing mood, but not the buoyant 
one, being tempered by something delicate and 
remote. The unheard melodies within it are 
the sweetest; it pipes to the spirit "ditties of 
no tone." Even its least rare fancies convev 
more than they say, and it must be confessed 
that much so-called poetry says more than it 
conveys. Whitman's mystical words : " All 
music is what awakes from you when you are 
reminded by the instruments," applies equally 
well to poetry, to poetry of suggestion, such as 
Miss Reese's. Yesterday's parted grace has 
been transmuted to poetry within us all, but 
it is a voiceless possession, speaking to us 
in the soul. Miss Reese 's poems, by a line 
or two, perhaps, put one in swift possession 
of that vanishing beauty within himself. It 
floods back, perchance in tears, but it is ours 
again. Take almost a random citation, for 
this quality is rarely absent from her poems, 
whether they summon Joy or Pain, — her lines 
" To A White Lilac " : 

I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour, 

Long-gone but unforgot ; 
Wherein I had for guerdon and for dower 

That one thing I have not. 



30 The Younger American Poets 

Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather, 

O phantom up the lane ; 
For back may come that spent and lovely weather, 

And I be glad again ! 

To analyze this, would be to pluck the mysti- 
cal white feather that a poet left untouched, 
that it might recall the grace of " some lone, 
delicate hour, long-gone but unforgot ; " but 
the soul of such an hour has subtilized for each 
of us in that spiritual memory-flower, and it 
needs no more than the opening line of this 
poem to invest the disillusioned day with a 
mood the same — yet not the same. Miss 
Reese has put it in two lines in her " Song of 
the Lavender Woman " : 

Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like 

these ? 
So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you 

ease. 

In another brief poem, the spirit of grief, that 
transmutes itself at last to music, to odor, to 
sunsets and dawns, becomes vital again in the 
scent of the box, the garden shrub. The lines 
show Miss Reese's susceptibility to impression 
from the most intangible sources : 

Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone, 

The box dripped in the air; 
Its odor through my house was blown 

Into the chamber there. 



Lizette Wood worth Reese 31 

Remote and yet distinct the scent, 

The sole thing of the kind, 
As though one spoke a word half meant 

That left a sting behind. 

I knew not Grief would go from me 

And naught of it be plain, 
Except how keen the box can be 

After a fall of rain. 

Miss Reese's art is its apparent lack of art, 
of conscious effort. Her diction is as simple 
in the mere store of words which she chooses 
to employ, as might be that of some poet to 
whom such a store was his sole equipment ; 
but what is that fine distinction between sim- 
plesse and simplicite ? One recognizes in her 
vocabulary the subtlest art of choice and elim- 
ination, art that is temperament, however, that 
selects by intuitive fitness and not by formulas 
or deliberate trying of effects. The words 
she employs are thrice distilled and clarified, 
until they become the essence of lucidity, and 
this essence in turn is crystallized into form in 
her poems. Perhaps they have, for some, too 
little warmth and color; they are not the rich- 
dyed words of passion, they are rather the 
white, delicate words of memory, but no others 
would serve as well. 

In reading certain poems of Miss Reese's, 



32 The Younger American Poets 

such as " Trust," or her lines " Writ In A Book 
Of Elizabethan Verse," the clarity of the lan- 
guage recalls a passage in a letter of Jean 
Ingelow's in which she exclaims : " Oh that 
I might wash my words in light ! " The im- 
pression which many of these lyrics convey is 
that Miss Reese has washed her words in light, 
so clear, so pure is their beauty. Take, for il- 
lustration, the much-quoted lines " Love Came 
Back At Fall O' Dew," and note the art and 
feeling achieved almost wholly in monosyllabic 
words : 

Love came back at fall o' dew, 

Playing his old part ; 
But I had a word or two, 

That would break his heart. 

" He who comes at candlelight, 

That should come before, 
Must betake him to the night 

From a barred door." 

This the word that made us part 

In the fall o' dew ; 
This the word that brake his heart-— 

Yet it brake mine, too ! 

A lyric imbued with charm, and into which a 
heart history is compressed, and yet employing 
but five or six words of more than one syllable ! 
Is this not clarifying to a purpose ? The lines 



Lizette Woodworth Reese 33 

called " Trust," illustrate with equal minute- 
ness the gift of putting into the simplest words 
some truth that seems to speak itself without 
calling attention to language or form, and, 
though having less of charm, they illustrate 
the point in question, that of absolute sim- 
plicity without insipidity. This is not, how- 
ever, to be taken as advice to all poets to 
cultivate the monosyllabic style. Because Miss 
Reese can achieve such an effect through it, 
when she chooses, as " Love Came Back At 
Fall O' Dew," does not argue that another 
poet would not corrupt it to nursery babble, 
nor would it be desirable to strive for it in 
any case. Song is impulse, not effort, and 
back of it is temperament. Miss Reese is a 
poet-singer; she is at her best in the pure lyric, 
the lyric that could be sung, and therefore her 
most artistic poems are such as are the least 
ornate, but have rare distinction in the purity, 
fitness, and individuality of her words. 

Very few modern lyrics possess the sing- 
ing quality. The term " lyric verse," as used 
to-day, is a misnomer. It is as intricate in 
form and phrase as if not consecrated to the 
lyre by poets in the dawn of art. The divorce 
between poetry and song grows more absolute 
year by year ; composers search almost vainly 

3 



34 The Younger American Poets 

through modern volumes of verse for lyrics 
that combine the melody and feeling, the 
spontaneity and grace, indispensable to song. 
It is not that the modern poet is unable to 
produce such, but that he does not choose. 
It has gone out of fashion, to state the case 
quite frankly, to write with a singing cadence ; 
something rare and strange must issue from 
the poet's lips, something inobvious. Art 
lurks in surprises, and the poet of to-day must 
be a diviner of mysteries, a searcher of secrets, 
in nature and humanity and truth, and a re- 
vealer of them in his art, though he reveal 
ofttimes but to conceal. 

Poetry grows more and more an intellectual 
pleasure for the cultured classes, less and less a 
possession of the people. Elizabethan song 
was upon the lips of the milkmaids and market- 
women, the common ear was trained to grace 
and melody ; but how many of the country folk 
of to-day know the involved numbers of our 
poets, or, knowing, could grasp them ? Who is 
writing the lays of the people? One can only 
answer that few are writing them because the 
spirit of poetic art has suffered' a sea-change 
into something rich and strange, and the poet 
of to-day would be fearful of his laurels should 
he write so artless a song as " Gather ye rose- 



Lizette Woodworth Reese 35 

buds while ye may," or " Come live with me and 
be my love," and yet these are beads that 
Time tells over on the rosary of Art. 

The question is too broad to discuss here. 
We should all agree, doubtless, as to the in- 
creasing separation between poetry and song, 
the increasing tendency of verse to appeal to 
the cultured classes ; but as to the desirability 
of returning to the simpler form, adapting 
theme and melody to the common ear — how 
many modern poets would agree upon that? 
There is a middle ground, however; the re- 
action against the highly ornate is already felt, 
and a finer art may be trusted to bring its own 
adjustments until poetry will again become of 
universal appeal. 

And how does this pertain to Miss Reese ? 
It pertains in that her ideal is the very return 
to clear, sympathetic song of which we have 
spoken. She would recapture the blitheness 
of Herrick, the valor of Lovelace, would lighten 
song's wings of their heaviness and shift Care 
and Wisdom to more prosaic burden-bearers. 
While the reminiscent mood is prevalent in her 
work, it is not melancholy, but has rather the 
iridescent glint of smiles and tears. Joy never 
quite departs, although " with finger at his lip, 
bidding adieu." Miss Reese's strife is toward 



36 The Younger American Poets 

a valiant cheer, whose passing she deplores in 
the poem called " Laughter " : 

Spirit of the gust and dew, 
Herrick had the last of you ! 

Empty are the morning hills. 
Herrick, he whose hearty airs 
Still are heard in our dull squares ; 

Herrick of the daffodils ! 

Now the pulpit and the mart 
Make an unquiet thing of Art, 

For we trade or else we preach ; 
Even the crocus, 'stead of song, 
Serves for text the April long ; 

Thus we set it out of reach. 

There is heartier food than ambrosia in this 
stanza. It is true that when we use the crocus 
for a text we set it out of reach, or, in common 
phrase, when poetry becomes didactic, Art flees. 
A dew-fresh song would teach the crocus' lesson, 
or many another lesson, without a hint of teach- 
ing it, merely by beauty; by the creed of Keats. 
Pope's didactic, sententious lines are gone ; but 
Keats, who never pointed a moral in his life, 
sings on eternally. Miss Reese too is votary 
to beauty for its own sake ; she gives one the 
flower, and he may extract the nectar for him- 
self. The nectar is always there for one's dis- 
tilling into the truth which is the essence of 



Lizette Woodworth Reese 37 

things. She does not herself extract and distil 
it, for hers is the art of suggestion. 

Having this creed of song, Miss Reese's 
themes are not widely inclusive. They are, 
however, the universal themes, — love, beauty, 
reverence, remembrance, joy that has been 
tempered to cheer, having met pain by the way ; 
for, as we have said, no encounter with pain 
— and her poems give abundant evidence of 
such encounter — has been able to subdue the 
valor of her spirit, or to quench the joy at 
the springs of her feeling, albeit the buoyant, 
brimful joy has given place to acquiescent 
cheer. 

There is a certain quality in Miss Reese's 
poems, a quaintness, an elder grace, that is 
wholly unique. It is the union of theme, 
phraseology, and atmosphere. The two former 
have been considered, but the spirit, after all, is 
in the last, in that which analysis cannot reach. 
One selects a poem from A Quiet Road illus- 
trative of this art of correlating Then and Now, 
making quick the dead in memory and hope, 
and sets about to analyze it, — when, lo, as if one 
had prisoned a white butterfly, it escapes, leav- 
ing only the dust of its wing in one's hand ! 
Miss Reese's poems are not to be analyzed, they 
are to be felt ; that, too, is the creed of her song. 



38 The Younger American Poets 

Is it difficult to feel these delicate lines called 
" The Road of Remembrance " ? — 

The old wind stirs the hawthorn tree ; 

The tree is blossoming ; 
Northward the road runs to the sea, 

And past the House of Spring. 

The folk go down it unafraid ; 

The still roofs rise before ; 
When you were lad and I was maid, 

Wide open stood that door. 

Now, other children crowd the stair, 
And hunt from room to room ; 

Outside, under the hawthorn fair, 
We pluck the thorny bloom. 

Out in the quiet road we stand, 

Shut in from wharf and mart, 
The old wind blowing up the land, 

The old thoughts at our heart. 

Miss Reese's growth, as shown in her two 
volumes, is so marked that while A Handful 
of Lavender has the foreshadowing of her 
later work, and also some notably fine poems, 
— such as " That Day You Came," " The Last 
Cricket," " A Spinning Song," and " The 
Old Path," — it has not the same perfectly 
individual note that pervades A Quiet Road. 
The personal mark, the artist-proof mark, upon 
nearly everything in the later collection, is fre- 



Lizette Woodworth Reese 39 

quently absent from the first. That part of 
A Hand/til of Lavender first issued as A 
Branch of May is naturally the least finished 
of Miss Reese's work. It is unsure and yet 
indicative of that — 

Oncoming hour of light and dew, 
Of heartier sun, more certain blue, 

which shines in her later work. 

" The Death Potion," from the first collec- 
tion, is a case in point : it is strong in idea, and 
here and there in execution, but its metre is 
faulty, and it departs so often from the initial 
measure that one who has set himself in tune 
with that is thrown from the key, and in adapt- 
ing himself to the changed rhythm loses the 
pleasure of the poem. 

It must be said, however, that such lack of 
metrical sensitiveness is very rare even in the 
earlier poems. In general, they are of unim- 
peachable rhythm ; indeed, the singing note is 
so much Miss Reese's natural expression that 
it creeps into this sonnet, " The Old Path," 
and turns it in effect to a lyric : 

O Love ! O Love ! this way has hints of you 
In every bough that stirs, in every bee, 

Yellow and glad, droning the thick grass through, 
In blooms red on the bush, white on the tree \ 



40 The Younger American Poets 

And when the wind, just now, came soft and fleet, 
Scattering the blackberry blossoms, and from some 

Fast darkening space that thrush sang sudden sweet, 
You were so near, so near, yet did not come ! 
Say, is it thus with you, O friend, this day ? 

Have you, for me that love you, thought or word ? 
Do I, with bud or bough, pass by your way ; 

With any breath of brier or note of bird ? 

If this I knew, though you be quick or dead, 
All my sad life would I go comforted. 

A Handful of Lavender shows the tendency 
of most young poets to affect the sonnet, a tend- 
ency laudable enough if one be a natural son- 
neteer. Miss Reese has many finely conceived 
and well-executed sonnets, but few that are 
unforgettably fine, as are many of her lyrics. 
That she recognizes wherein her surest power 
lies is obvious from the fact that, whereas A 
Handful of Lavender contains some thirty-two 
sonnets, A Quiet Road contains but twelve. 
Those of nature predominated in the former, 
nature for its own sake ; but in the latter there 
is far less accent upon nature and more upon 
life. 

They show in technique, also, Miss Reese's 
firmer, surer touch and greater clarity. There 
are certain sonnets in A Handful of Lavender, 
such as " A Song of Separation," and " Renun- 
ciation," warmer in feeling than the later ones 



Lizette Woodworth Reese 41 

and equal to them in manner ; but in general 
the mechanism is much more apparent — one 
does occasionally see the wires, which is never 
the case in the later work. 

" The Look of the Hedge," or these lines 
called " Recompense," will illustrate the ease 
and lucidity of her sonnets in A Quiet Road: 

Sometimes, yea, often, I forget, forget ; 

Pass your closed door with not a thought of you, 

Of the old days, but only of these new ; 
I sow j I reap ; my house in order set. 

Then of a sudden doth this thing befall, 
By a wood's edge, or in the market-place, 
That I remember naught but your ttefarr' face, 

And other folk forgotten, you are all. 
When this is so, oh, sooth the time and sweet ! 

And I, thereafter, am like unto one 

Who from the lilac bloom and the young year 
Comes to a chamber shuttered from the street, 

Yet heeds nor emptiness nor lack of sun, 
For that the recompensing Spring is near ! 

There are excellently wrought sonnets in the 
first volume, indeed, the majority of them are 
not without fine lines or true feeling, but 
the gain in command of the form has been 
marked. When all is said, however, one comes 
back to A Quiet Road for the songs it holds, 
and for these he treasures it. Miss Reese has 
epitomized, in her lines " Writ In A Book Of 



42 The Younger American Poets 

Elizabethan Verse," her own characteristics 
under those of the earlier singers, sounded the 
delicate notes of her own reed, when she says : 

Mine is the crocus and the call 
Of gust to gust in shrubberies tall ; 

The white tumult, the rainy hush ; 

And mine the unforgetting thrush 
That pours its heart-break from the wall. 

For I am tears, for I am Spring, 
The old and immemorial thing ; 

To me come ghosts by twos and threes, 

Under the swaying cherry-trees, 
From east and west remembering. 

O elder Hour, when I am not, 

Gone out like smoke from road and plot, 

More perfect Hour of light and dew, 

Shall lovers turn away from you, 
And long for me, the Unforgot ! 

Surely they will, for clear, pure song keeps 
its vibrancy, and the note to which is set 
the quaintness of such words as these in 
Miss Reese's poem " A Pastoral," will not 
easily be forgotten : 

Oho, my love, oho, my love, and ho, the bough that shows, 
Against the grayness of mid-Lent, the color of the rose ! 
The lights o' Spring are in the sky and down among the 

grass ; 
Bend low, bend low, ye Kentish reeds, and let two lovers 

pass ! 



Lizette Woodworth Reese 43 

The plum-tree is a straitened thing; the cherry is but vain; 
The thorn but black and empty at the turning of the lane ; 
Yet mile by mile out in the wind the peach-trees blow and 

blow, 
And which is stem and which is bloom, not any maid can 

know. 

The ghostly ships sail up to town and past the orchard wall; 
There is a leaping in the reeds ; they waver and they fall ; 
For lo, the gusts of God are out ; the April time is brief; 
The country is a pale red rose, and dropping leaf by leaf. 

I do but keep me close beside and hold my lover's hand ; 
Along the narrow track we pass across the level land ; 
The petals whirl about us and the sedge is to our knees ; 
The ghostly ships sail up, sail up, beyond the stripping trees. 

When we are old, when we are cold, and barred is the door, 
The memory of this will come and turn us young once 

more ; 
The lights o' Spring will dim the grass and tremble from the 

sky; 
And all the Kentish reeds bend low to let us two go by ! 

Miss Reese's work in A Quiet Road is so uni- 
formly quotable that one distrusts his judgment 
in the matter of choice, and having cited one 
poem as representative comes suddenly upon 
another that might have served him better; 
such an one, perhaps, is that to Robert Louis 
Stevenson, in its penetrative feeling, showing 
Miss Reese to be a diviner of spirits. One 



44 The Younger American Poets 

need hardly be told that she is of the " mystic 
fellowcraft " of Stevenson, and although the 
very name of the valorous one has become a 
sort of fetich among his lovers everywhere, one 
would go far to find him set forth more bravely 
than in this characterization, of which a part 
must suffice to show the quality: 

In his old gusty garden of the North, 
He heard lark-time the uplifting Voices call ; 
Smitten through with Voices was the evenfall — 

At last they drove him forth. 

Now there were two rang silverly and long ; 
And of Romance, that spirit of the sun, 
And of Romance, spirit of youth, was one ; 

And one was that of Song. 

Gold-belted sailors, bristling buccaneers, 
The flashing soldier, and the high, slim dame, 
These were the Shapes that all around him came,- 

That we let go with tears. 

His was the unstinted English of the Scot, 
Clear, nimble, with the scriptural tang of Knox 
Thrust through it like the far, strict scent of box, 

To keep it unforgot. 

No frugal Realist, but quick to laugh, 
To see appealing things in all he knew, 
He plucked the sun-sweet corn his fathers grew, 

And would have naught of chaff. 



Lizette Woodworth Reese 45 

David and Keats and all good singing men, 
Take to your hearts this Covenanter's son, 
Gone in mid-years, leaving our years undone — 

Where you do sing again ! 

There ! I have repented me and quoted it all, 
to preserve the unity. 

To be rare and quaint without being fantas- 
tic, to have swift-conceiving fancy that turns 
into poetry the near-by thing that many over- 
look — this is Miss Reese's gift. You shall not 
go to her for ethics, philosophy, nor for instruc- 
tion of any kind, for that is contrary to her 
creed ; but you shall go to her for truth, truth 
that has become personal through experience; 
go to her for beauty, uplift, and refreshment, 
and above all for the recovery of the departed 
mood. 



1 



III 

BLISS CARMAN 

^HE presence of Mr. Carman, a Canadian 
singer, among a group of poets of the 
States, needs no explanation ; so iden- 
tified is he with the artistic life of the younger 
generation on this side the border that we have 
come to forget his earlier allegiance, and to 
consider his work, most of which has been pro- 
duced here, as distinctly our own. But while 
it is gratifying to feel that so much of his verse 
has drawn its inspiration from nature and life 
as we know them, one could little spare Mr. 
Carman's first book of lyrics, Low Tide on 
Grand Pre, which is purely Canadian — set in 
the air of the " blue North summer." 

It lacks as a collection the confident touch 
of his later work, but is imbued with an indefin- 
able delicacy ; it withholds the uttermost word, 
and its grace is that of suggestion. Especially 
is this true of the initial poem, a lyric with a 
poignant undernote calling one back thrice 
and again to learn its spell. 



Bliss Carman 47 

It has been Mr. Carman's method to issue at 
intervals small volumes containing work of a 
related sort ; but it is open to question whether 
this method of publishing, with the harmony 
which results from grouping each collection 
under a certain key, may not have a counter- 
balancing danger in the tendency toward 
monotony. As a matter of fact, Mr. Carman 
has a wide range of subject; but unless one be 
ever taking a bird's-eye view of his work, it is 
likely to seem restricted, owing to the reiterance 
of the same note in whatever collection he 
chance to have in hand. A case in point is 
that furnished by Ballads of Lost Haven, one of 
his most characteristic and fascinating volumes, 
a very wizardy of sea moods, yet it has no fewer 
than four poems, succeeding one another at the 
close of the collection, prefiguring death under 
the titles of " The Shadow Boatswain," " The 
Master of the Isles," " The Last Watch," and 
" Outbound." 

Each of these is blended of mystery, lure, and 
dread; each conveys the feeling it was meant 
to convey; but when the four poems of similar 
motive are grouped together, their force is lost. 
The symbols which seem in each to rise as spon- 
taneously from the sea as its own foam, lose their 
magic when others of like import, but different 



48 The Younger American Poets 

phrasing, crowd closely upon them. For illus- 
tration, the " Shadow Boatswain " contains 
these fine lines: 

Don't you know the sailing orders? 
It is time to put to sea, 
And the stranger in the harbor 
Sends a boat ashore for me. 

That 's the Doomkeel. You may know her 
By her clean run aft ; and then 
Don't you hear the Shadow Boatswain 
Piping to his shadow men? 

And " The Master of the Isles," immediately 
following, opens in this equally picturesque, 
but essentially similar, manner: 

There is rumor in Dark Harbor, 
And the folk are all astir; 
For a stranger in the offing 
Draws them down to gaze at her, 

In the gray of early morning, 
Black against the orange streak, . 
Making in below the ledges, 
With no colors at her peak. 

While each of the poems develops differently, 
and taken alone has a symbolistic beauty that 
would fix itself in the memory, when the two 
are put together and are followed by two others 
cognate in theme, the lines of relief have melted 
into one indistinct image. This effect of blurr- 



Blisb Carman 49 

ing from the grouping of related poems is not 
so apparent in any collection as in the sea 
ballads, as the subject-matter of the other vol- 
umes is more diversified and the likelihood 
of employing somewhat the same imagery is 
therefore removed ; but while Mr. Carman has 
a very witchery of phrase when singing of the 
sea, and his words sting one with delight like 
a dash of brine, one would, for that very reason, 
keep the impression vivid, forceful, complete, 
and grudges the merging of it into others and 
yet others that shall dissipate it or transform it 
to an impalpable thing. 

Judging them individually, it is doubtful if 
Mr. Carman has done anything more represen- 
tative, more imbued with his own temperament, 
than these buoyant, quickening songs that 
freshen one as if from a plunge in the sea, 
and take one to themselves as intimately. The 
opening poem sets the key to the collection : 

I was born for deep-sea faring ; 
I was bred to put to sea ; 
Stories of my father's daring 
Filled me at my mother's knee. 

I was sired among the surges ; 
I was cubbed beside the foam ; 
All my heart is in its verges, 
And the sea wind is my home. 

4 



50 The Younger American Poets 

All my boyhood, from far vernal 
Bourns of being, came to me 
Dream-like, plangent, and eternal 
Memories of the plunging sea. 

And what a gruesome, eerie fascination is in 
this picture at whose faithfulness one shudders : 

Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old, 
And well his work is done. 
With an equal grave for lord and knave, 
He buries them every one. 

Then hoy and rip, with a rolling hip, 

He makes for the nearest shore ; 

And God, who sent him a thousand ship, 

Will send him a thousand more ; 

But some he '11 save for a bleaching grave, 

And shoulder them in to shore, — 

Shoulder them in, shoulder them in, 

Shoulder them in to shore. 

How the swing of the lines befits the action, 
and how it puts on grace in this stanza, 

Oh, the ships of Greece and the ships of Tyre 
Went out, and where are they? 
In the port they made, they are delayed 
With the ships of yesterday. 

The remaining strophes tempt one beyond 
what he is able, especially this characterization, 

Oh, a loafing, idle lubber to him 
Is the sexton of the town ; 



Bliss Carman 51 

but we must take a glance at the ballads, at 
the " Nancy's Pride," that went out 

On the long slow heave of a lazy sea, 
To the flap of an idle sail, 

• • • • • 

and 

. . . faded down 

With her creaking boom a-swing, 

Till a wind from the deep came up with a creep, 

And caught her wing and wing. 

She lifted her hull like a breasting gull 
Where the rolling valleys be, 
And dipped where the shining porpoises 
Put ploughshares through the sea. 

• • • • • 

They all may home on a sleepy tide 
To the sag of an idle sheet ; 
But it 's never again the Nancy's Pride 
That draws men down the street. 

But the fishermen on the Banks, in the eerie 
watches of the moon, behold this apparition : 

When the light wind veers, and the white fog clears, 

They see by the after rail 

An unknown schooner creeping up 

With mildewed spar and sail. 

Her crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds, 
With the Judgment in their face ; 
And to their mates' " God save you ! " 
Have never a word of grace. 



52 The Younger American Poets 

Then into the gray they sheer away, 

On the awful polar tide ; 

And the sailors know they have seen the wraith 

Of the missing Nancy's Pride 

There have been spectral ships since visions 
were, but few conjured so vividly that one may 
almost see the 

crew lean forth by the rotting shrouds 
With the Judgment in their face, 

and watch them as 

into the gray they sheer away 
On the awful polar tide. 

The poem illustrates Mr. Carman's gift of put- 
ting atmosphere into his work. A line may 
give the color, the setting, for an entire poem, — 
a very simple line, as this, 

With her creaking boom a-swing, 

or, " To the sag of an idle sheet," which fixes 
at once the impression of a sultry, languorous 
air, one of those, half-veiled, " weather-breeder " 
days one knows so well. 

From a narrative standpoint the ballads are 
spirited, there is always a story worth telling; 
but they are occasionally marred by Mr. Car- 
man's prolixity, the besetting sin of his art. He 
who can crowd so much into a line is often 
lacking in the faculty of its appraisal, and fre- 



Bliss Carman 53 

quently a crisp, telling phrase or stanza is 
weakened by the accretion that gathers around 
it. Beauty is rarely wanting in this accretion, 
but beauty that is not organic, not structurally 
necessary to the theme, becomes verbiage. 
Walter Pater has said it all in his fine passage : 
" For in truth all art does but consist in the 
removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the 
gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of 
invisible dust, back to the earliest divination 
of the finished work to be, lying somewhere, 
according to Michael Angelo's fancy, in the 
rough-hewn block of stone." It is not Mr. 
Carman's divination of the finished work to be 
that is at fault ; one feels that the subject is 
clearly visioned in his mind at the outset, but 
that it proves in some cases too alluring to his 
fancy. His work is not artificial; he is not 
fashioning poetic bric-a-brac to adorn his verse ; 
sincerity is writ large upon it ; but his mood is 
so compelling that he is carried on by the force 
of momentum, and finding, when the impulse is 
spent, so much beauty left behind, he has not 
the heart to destroy it. 

One pardons this over-elaboration in Ballads 
of Lost Haven because of the likelihood of 
coming upon a pungent phrase, like a whiff of 
kelp, that shall transform some arid spot to the 



54 The Younger American Poets 

blue leagues of sea ; and for such a poem as 
"The Ships of St. John," with no superfluous 
lines, with a calm, sabbatic beauty, one is wholly 
Mr. Carman's debtor. 

Behind the Arras has proven a stumbling- 
block and rock of offence to some of Mr. Car- 
man's readers, because of its recondite char- 
acter. They regard it as something esoteric that 
only the initiate may grasp, whereas its mysti- 
cism is half whimsical, and requires no super- 
consciousness to divine it. Mr. Carman is 
founding no cult; it pleases him for the nonce 
to mask his thought in symbols, and there are, 
alas, minds of the rectangular sort that have no 
use for symbols ! It is a book containing many 
strong poems, such as " Beyond the Gamut," 
" Exit Anima," and " Hack and Hew," — a book 
of spiritual enigmas through which one catches 
hints of the open secret, ever-alluring, ever- 
eluding, and follows new clews to the mystery, 
immanent, yet undivined. 

Earth one habitat of spirit merely, 
I must use as richly as I may, — 
Touch environment with every sense-tip, 
Drink the well and pass my wander way, — 

says this sane poet who holds his gift as a trib- 
ute, whose philosophy is to affirm and not deny : 



Bliss Carman 55 

O hand of mine and brain of mine, be yours, 
While time endures, 
To acquiesce and learn ! 

For what we best may dare and drudge and yearn, 
Let soul discern. 

And who through the grime and in the babel 
still sees and hears, 

Always the flawless beauty, — always the Chord 

Of the Overword, 

Dominant, pleading, sure, 

No truth too small to save and make endure ; 

No good too poor ! 

This is the vision that shall lighten our eyes, 
quicken our ears, and restore our hope, — the 
vision which we expect the poet to see and to 
communicate. He must make the detached 
and fragmentary beauty a typical revelation; 
the relative must foreshadow the absolute, as 
the moon's arc reveals by its mystic rim the 
fulness to which it is orbing. It is not by dis- 
regarding the tragic, the sombre, the inexpli- 
cable, that Mr. Carman comes into his vision. 
Pain has more than touched him ; it has become 
incorporate in him. Low Tide on Grand Pre 
has its poignant note; Ballads of Lost Haven, 
its undertone ; Behind the Arras, its overtone, 
its sublimation. 



56 The Younger American Poets 

Mr. Carman's work is more subjective than 
that of many of the younger poets without 
being less objective, as the Vagabondia books 
attest. In one mood he is the mystic, dwelling 
in a speculative nebula of thought, in another 
the realist concerning himself only with the 
demonstrable, and hence his work discloses a 
wide range of affinities. He is not a strongly 
constructive thinker, but intuitional in his 
mental processes, and his verse demands that 
gift in his readers. Without it what could one 
make of " The Juggler " but a poem of delicious 
color and music ? If its import were none other 
than appears upon the face of it, it would still 
be admirable, but as a symbol of the Force 
projecting us, it is a subtle bit of art. 

Mr. Carman's sensitiveness to values of 
rhythm keeps his verse free from lapses in 
that direction. He never, to my memory, 
makes use of the sonnet, which shows critical 
judgment, as the lyric is his temperamental 
medium. The apogee of his art is in his dic- 
tion, which has a predestined fitness, and above 
all a personal quality. To quote Pater again, 
he has " begotten a vocabulary faithful to the 
coloring of his own spirit," and one cannot 
mistake even a fragment of his verse. Now 
and again one comes upon an archaic expres- 



Bliss Carman 57 

sion, as "A weird is in their song," using the 
ancient noun-form, or upon such a meaning- 
less solecism, at least to the uninitiate, as 
"illumining this quench of clay," but in general 
Mr. Carman does not find it necessary to go 
outside the established limits of the language 
for variety and force in diction. He has a 
genius for imagery, and conjures the most 
unsullied fancies from every aspect of nature. 
The Vagabondia books are abrim with them, 
and while there are idle lines and padded 
stanzas, there are few of the poems that do not 
strike true flashes here and there, few that 
miss of justification, while their gay and rol- 
licking note heartens one and bids him up 
and join in the revel. 

There are others in a graver key, such as 
Hovey's " At the End of the Day," and Carman's 
" The Mendicants," and " The Marching Mor- 
rows;" and certain lyric inspirations, such as 
the " Sea Gypsy," by Hovey, and the " Vagabond 
Song," by Carman, that have not been bettered 
by either, that could not well be bettered within 
their limits. The former has been quoted in 
the study of Hovey; the latter is equally an in- 
spiration. Within the confines of two stanzas 
Mr. Carman has suggested what volumes of 
nature-verse could never say. He does not 



58 The Younger American Poets 

analyze it to a finish, nor let the magic slip 
through his fingers; under his touch it subtil- 
izes into atmosphere and thus communicates 
the incommunicable : 

There is something in the autumn that is native to my 

blood — 
Touch of manner, hint of mood ; 
And my heart is like a rhyme, 
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping 

time. 

The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry 

Of bugles going by. 

And my lonely spirit thrills 

To see the frosty asters like a smoke upon the hills. 

There is something in October sets the gypsy blood astir ; 

We must rise and follow her, 

When from every hill of flame 

She calls and calls each vagabond by name. 

Throwing aside all that is ephemeral in the 
Vagabondia books, all mere boyish ebullition, 
there is a goodly residuum of nature-poetry of 
the freshest and most unhackneyed sort. It 
is the blithe, objective type; eyes and ears are 
its informers, and it enters into one's mood 
with a keen sense of refreshment. Who does 
not know the impulse that prompted these 
lines ? 



Bliss Carman 59 

Make me over, mother April, 
When the sap begins to stir ! 
When thy flowery hand delivers 
All the mountain-prisoned rivers, 
And thy great heart beats and quivers 
To revive the days that were, 
Make me over, mother April, 
When the sap begins to stir ! 

The temper of the Vagabondia books is 
thoroughly wholesome ; courage and cheer 
dominate them ; in short, they are good to 
know; and while it is not vitally necessary to 
remember all they contain, one would be dis- 
tinctly the loser should he forget such poems 
as " Non Omnis Moriar" or "The Deserted 
Inn " from The Last Songs. 

The collection of Memorabilia, By the Aure- 
lian Wall, takes its title from the burial-place 
of Keats, and includes " A Seamark," the fine 
threnody on Stevenson; a thrilling eulogy of 
Phillips Brooks; a spiritual, poetic visioning 
of Shelley under the symbol of " The White 
Gull ; " a Bohemian lyric to Paul Verlaine, and 
other things equally well-wrought. Some of 
them need distilling; the poem to Shelley, in 
particular, volatilizes to the vanishing-point — 
but what haunting sweetness it carries with it! 
To be sure, Shelley is elusive, and Matthew 
Arnold's " beautiful but ineffectual angel, beat- 



6o The Younger American Poets 

ing in the void his luminous wings in vain," 
has come to dominate the popular fancy in 
regard to him. Mr. Carman's poem, though 
touched with this mood, is not set to it, and he 
has several stanzas which have in them the 
essence of Shelley's spirit, — the real Shelley, 
the passionate idealist, the spent runner who, 
falling, handed on the torch. 

The Stevenson threnody is probably the 
best of the elegies, as Mr. Carman is by tem- 
perament one of the Stevenson brotherhood, 
and no subject could better command him. 
That " intimate and magic name," a password 
to fellowship, conjures many a picture of him — 

Whose courage lights the dark'ning port 
Where every sea-worn sail must come. 

Mr. Carman has singular power to visualize a 

scene ; one becomes an eye-witness of it as of 

this: 

But I have wander-biddings now. 
Far down the latitudes of sun, 
An island mountain of the sea, 
Piercing the green and rosy zone, 

Goes up into the wondrous day. 
And there the brown-limbed island men 
Are bearing up for burial, 
Within the sun's departing ken, 



Bliss Carman 61 

The master of the roving kind. 

And there where time will set no mark 

For his irrevocable rest, 

Under the spacious melting dark, 

With all the nomad tented stars 
About him, they have laid him down 
Above the crumbling of the sea, 
Beyond the turmoil of renown. 

This island procession to the mountain, leaving 
the master to his " irrevocable rest," 

Under the spacious melting dark, 
With all the nomad tented stars 
About him, 

is an artist's picture not easily forgotten. 

Mr. Carman's three volumes in the projected 
" Pipes of Pan " series, including thus far The 
Book of the Myths, The Green Book of the 
Bards, and The Sea Children, make new dis- 
closures of his talent, and the title poem 
" Pipes of Pan," is a bit of anointed vision 
that would waken the dullest eyes from leth- 
argy as to the world around them. There is 
necromancy in Mr. Carman's words when the 
outer world is his theme ; something of the 
thrill, the expectancy in the heart of growing 
things, the elation of life, comes upon one as he 
reads the " Pipes of Pan." It is a nobler vision 
than illumined Vagabondia days, revealing 



62 The Younger American Poets 

Power out of hurt and stain 
To bring beauty back again, 

and showing the 

Scope and purpose, hint and plan 
Lurking in the Pipes of Pan, 

as well as the sheer delight that we noted in 
Vagabondia. 

It seems that every mood of every creature 
has been divined and uttered, uttered with deep 
love, with a human relatedness that melts the 
barriers between life and life, whether in man 

or in 

All the bright, gay- colored things 
Buoyed in air on balanced wings. 

This relatedness, and all the molding influences 
of nature leading us on from beauty to strength, 
are developed in Mr. Carman's poem until they 
become to us religion. We realize that at 
heart we are all pantheists, and that revelation 
antedates the Book ; that the law is written on 
the leaves of roses as well as on tables of stone, — 
a testament both new and old, given for our 
learning that we might have hope. 

The remaining poems of The Book of the 
Myths are not the best things Mr. Carman has 
done, though renewals of classic verse-forms 
in the Sapphic and other metres, and often 



Bliss Carman 63 

picturesque in story. " The Lost Dryad " is 
the most attractive, " The Dead Faun " the 
least so, to my ears ; but perhaps from lack 
of sympathy with the subject-matter I cannot 
think the collection, with the exception of the 
poem " Pipes of Pan," is of especial value. It 
is not to be named, still excepting the above 
poem, with its companion volume, The Green 
Book of the Bards, which contains some of the 
strongest work of Mr. Carman's pen as to sub- 
ject and thought, but which has one pronounced 
limitation, — its monotony of form. 

The entire volume, with a sole exception, 
and that not marked, is written in the conven- 
tional four-line stanza, in which so much of Mr. 
Carman's work of late has been cast. Within 
this compass, the accomplishment is as varied 
as to theme and diction, as that of his other 
work ; but when one sings on and on in the same 
numbers, it induces a state of mental indolence 
in the reader, and presupposes a similar state 
in the writer. The verse goes purling musically 
along, until, as running water exercises an 
hypnotic spell, one is hypnotized by the mere 
melody of the lines, and comes to consciousness 
to find that he has no notion what they are 
about, and must re-read them to find out. To 
be sure, the poems will bear reviewing, and 



64 The Younger American Poets 

will make new disclosures whenever one returns 
to them; but had they greater variety as to 
manner, their appeal would be stronger, as the 
mind would be startled to perception by unex- 
pectedness, instead of lulled by the same note 
in liquid reiterance. It is quite possible that 
Mr. Carman has a principle at stake in this, — it 
may indeed be a reactionary measure against 
over-evident mechanism, a wholesome desire 
for simplicity. Now simplicity is one of the 
first canons of art, but variety in metre 
and form is another canon by no means an- 
nulling the first. One may have variety to 
the superlative degree, and never depart from 
the fitness and clearness that spell simplicity. 

Were The Green Book of the Bards relieved 
by contrasts of form, it would rank with the 
finest work of Mr. Carman's pen, as the in- 
dividual poems have strong basic ideas, — such 
as the " Creature Catechism," full of pregnant 
thought, and speaking a vital, spiritual word 
as to the mystic union of the creative Soul with 
the creatures of feather and fin and fleece. 
The marked evolution of Mr. Carman's phi- 
losophy of life, as influenced by his growing 
identity with nature, comes out so strongly in 
the " Pipes of Pan " series, »and in The Word at 
Saint Kaviris, as almost to reveal a new in- 



Bliss Carman 65 

dividuality. He had gone out in the light-foot, 
light-heart days of Vagabondia, holidaying with 
the woods and winds ; glad to be quit of the 
gyves, to drink from the wayside spring, eat 
of the forest fruit, sleep 'neath the tent of 
night, and dream to the rune of the pines. He 
had sought nature in a mood of pagan joy ; but 
the wayside spring had excited a thirst it could 
not quench, and the forest fruit a hunger it 
could not allay, and the blithe seeker of free- 
dom and delight became at length the anointed 
votary, and lingered to watch the God at work 
shaping life from death, and expressing His 
yearning in beauty. 

The mere objective delight of the earlier 
time has grown steadily into the subjective 
identity with every manifestation of the Force 
that operates within this world of wonder and 
beauty, from the soul of man, shaping his ideals 
and creating his environment, to the butterfly 
whose sun-painted wings, set afloat in the 
buoyant air, are upheld by the breath of God. 
Coming into the finer knowledge, through long 
intimacy with the earth and its multitudinous 
life, fulfilling itself in joy, — Mr. Carman has 
come at length to 

readjust 
The logic of the dust, 

5 



66 The Younger American Poets 

and to shape from it a creed and law for his 

following, which he has put into the mouth 

of Saint Kavin for expounding. The opening 

stanzas of the volume give the setting and 

note: 

Once at St. Kavin's door 

I rested. No sigh more 
Of discontent escaped me from that day. 
For there I overheard 
A Brother of the Word 
Expound the grace of poverty, and say : 

Thank God for poverty 

That makes and keeps us free, 
And lets us go our unobtrusive way, 
Glad of the sun and rain, 
Upright, serene, humane, 
Contented with the fortune of a day. 

The poem follows simple, but no less pictur- 
esque phrase, as becomes Saint Kavin, and is, 
from the technical side, quaint and artistic. On 
the philosophical, it develops at first the initial 
thought that one shall " keep his soul " 

Joyous and sane and whole 

by obeying the word 

That bade the earth take form, the sea subside, 

and that 

When we have laid aside 

Our truculence and pride, 
Craven self-seeking, turbulent self-will, — 



Bliss Carman 67 

we shall have found the boon of our ultimate 
striving, — room to live and let our spirits 
grow, and give of their growth and higher 
gain to another. Here is the giving that 
turns to one's own enrichment : 

And if I share my crust, 

As common manhood must, 
With one whose need is greater than my own, 
Shall I not also give 
His soul, that it may live, 
Of the abundant pleasures I have known ? 

And so, if I have wrought, 

Amassed or conceived aught 
Of beauty, or intelligence or power, 
It is not mine to hoard ; 
It stands there to afford 
Its generous service simply as a flower. 

The poem then broadens into a dissertation 
upon the complexities of life, one's servitude 
to custom and "vested wrong," the lack of 
individual courage to 

Live by the truth each one of us believes, 

and turns, for illustration of the nobler devel- 
opment and poise, back to nature, and the 
evolutionary round of life through which one 
traces his course and kinship. These stanzas 
are among the finest spoken by the wise 



68 The Younger American Poets 

Brother of the Word. After citing the strength 
and serenity of the fir-trees, and what a travesty 
upon man's ascent it were, did one bear him- 
self less royally than they, he adverts to the 
creature kin-fellows whose lot we have borne : 

I, too, in polar night 

Have hungered, gaunt and white, 
Alone amid the awful silences ; 
And fled on gaudy fin, 
When the blue tides came in, 
Through coral gardens under tropic seas. 

And wheresoe'er I strove, 

The greater law was love, 
A faith too fine to falter or mistrust ; 
There was no wanton greed, 
Depravity of breed, 
Malice nor cant nor enmity unjust. 

Nay, not till I was man, 

Learned I to scheme and plan 
The blackest depredation on my kind, 
Converting to my gain 
My fellow's need and pain 
In chartered pillage, ruthless and refined. 

Therefore, my friends, I say 

Back to the fair sweet way 
Our Mother Nature taught us long ago, — 
The large primeval mood, 
Leisure and amplitude, 
The dignity of patience strong and slow. 



Bliss Carman 69 

Let us go in once more 

By some blue mountain door, 
And hold communion with the forest leaves ; 
Where long ago we trod 
The Ghost House of the God, 
Through orange dawns and amethystine eves ! 

Then follows a glad picturing of the allurements 
of this place of return, a more thoughtful one 
of its requitals, and the infinitude of care be- 
stowed upon every task to which the Master 
Craftsman sets his hand, and orbs into a vision 
of the soul enlarged by breathing the freer 
air and by regaining therefrom her " primal 
ecstasy and poise." It traces also the soul's 
commission, 

To fill her purport in the ampler plan. 

Altogether the Word is admirably expounded 
by Saint Kavin, and one is distinctly the gainer 
for having rested at his door to learn not only 
the grace of joyousness, but the means to that 
grace. 

In his latest work, constructing from the 
"fragments" of Sappho lyrics that should 
bear as close relation to the original as an ima- 
gination imbued with the Sapphic traditions 
and a temperament sympathetically Greek 
would enable him to do, — Mr. Carman under- 
took a daring task, but one whose promise he 



70 The Younger American Poets 

has made good, as poetry, however near it may 
approach to the imagined loveliness of those lost 
songs of the Lesbian, which have served by 
their haunting beauty to keep vital her memory 
through twenty-five centuries in which un- 
numbered names have gone to oblivion. 

Of the " Ode to Aphrodite," the most complete 
Sapphic poem extant, many translations and 
paraphrases have been made, those by Edwin 
Arnold, John Addington Symonds, Ambrose 
Philips, Swinburne, etc., being among the 
finest ; and were there space it would be inter- 
esting to show by comparison that Mr. Car- 
man's rendering of the Ode ranks well with the 
standard already set. 

Of the fragments, also, while perhaps no 
previous attempt has been made to give an 
imaginative recast to so large a number of 
them, many have been incorporated by Swin- 
burne in his " Anactoria," and fugitive stanzas 
in the work of Rossetti, Tennyson, Byron, and 
others, attest this source. To refashion them, 
however, after the manner, as Mr. Roberts says 
in his introduction to the volume, of a sculptor 
restoring a statue by Praxiteles from the mere 
suggestion of a hand or a finger, — is a work of 
artistic imagination demanding the finest sym- 
pathy, taste, and kinship with the theme, as 



Bliss Carman 71 

well as the poet's touch to shape it; and while 
no one may pronounce upon the fidelity of the 
work, beyond its Greek spirit and command of 
the Sapphic metres, together with the inter- 
pretation of the original fragment, it has great 
charm of phrase and atmosphere and a certain 
pensive beauty even in the most impassioned 
stanzas, setting them to a different note from 
that usually met in Sapphic paraphrases; as 
in these lines : 

O heart of insatiable longing, 

What spell, what enchantment allures thee, 

Over the rim of the world 

With the sails of the sea-going ships ? 

And when the rose petals are scattered 
At dead of still noon on the grass-plot, 
What means this passionate grief, — 
This infinite ache of regret? 1 

Among the most familiar of the fragments is 
that of the " apple reddening upon the top- 
most bough," which Rossetti has put into 
charming phrase, together with its companion 
verse upon the wild hyacinth ; but while these 
lines are of haunting charm, they do not make 
a complete stanza, the comparison being un- 

1 From Sappho : One Hundred Lyrics. Copyright, 1903, 
by L. C. Page & Co. 



72 The Younger American Poets 

known ; whereas Mr. Carman, in recasting the 
fragment, has supplied a logical complement 
to the lines and symmetrized them, together 
with their companion illustration, to a lyric. 
His rendering, too, while less musical, from 
being unrhymed, is picturesque and concise, 
each word being made to tell as a stroke in a 
sketch : 

Art thou the topmost apple 
The gatherers could not reach, 

Reddening on the bough? 
Shall not I take thee ? 

Art thou a hyacinth blossom 
The shepherds upon the hills 

Have trodden into the ground? 
Shall not I lift thee ? 

The first Rossetti stanza ends with a fantastic 
play upon words explaining that, although the 
gatherers did not get the coveted apple, they 

Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till 
now, 

which, although a pleasant poetical mix-up, is 
hardly in keeping with the dignity of the com- 
parison, which dignity Mr. Carman has well 
preserved. 

Another fragment made familiar by adap- 
tation is that to Hesperus, expanded by Byron 



Bliss Carman 73 

into one of the great passages of " Don Juan." 
Mr. Carman gives a more compact rendering 
and again brings the lines to such a close 
as shall render them a complete lyric. They 
scarcely vie in beauty with the Byron passage, 
which is one of the surest strokes of his hand, 
but have their own charm and grace : 

Hesperus, bringing together 

All that the morning star scattered, — 

Sheep to be folded in twilight, 
Children for mothers to fondle, — 

Me, too, will bring to the dearest, 
Tenderest breast in all Lesbos. 

The fragment, " I loved thee, Athis, in the 
long ago," has been expanded by Mr. Carman 
into a poem of reminiscent mood, the long, 
slow-moving pentameter enhancing the effect 
of pensive meditation which the lines convey. 
Many of the fragments are of a blither note, 
having the variety which distinguishes the 
original. 

Mr. Carman has exercised a fine restraint 
in his treatment of the fragments. They are 
not over-ripe in diction, nor over-elaborated, 
and while there is a certain atmosphere of 
insubstantiality about many of them, as could 



74 The Younger American Poets 

scarcely fail to result from the attempt to 
restore, by imagination alone, what had exist- 
ence but in tradition, they justify themselves 
as artistic poetry, which is the only consid- 
eration of moment. 



IV 

LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY 

SOME critic has said of Miss Guiney's 
work, that to come suddenly upon it 
among other volumes of modern poetry 
is like coming upon a Greek temple in an 
American woodland; and the comparison is an 
apt one, though the temple should scarcely be 
Greek, for while the feeling and structure of 
the work are classic in atmosphere, they are 
not warm enough, sensuous enough, to be 
Greek. It would, indeed, be hard to say with 
what race classicism Miss Guiney's work is 
tinctured. Rather say that she is a classic by 
temperament and has drawn to herself, as by 
chemical affinity, such things as are rare and 
choice in the world of books and life, and has 
fused them in the alembic of her own nature, 
until the resultant blend is something new and 
strange, having a racy tang and a flavor all its 
own, and yet with a hint of all the elements 
that went to its compounding. 

Most minds take on learning by a miscel- 
laneous accretion that results in information 



j6 The Younger American Poets 

without individuality, but Miss Guiney hives 
in many fields and lands the quaint, the pic- 
turesque, the beautiful, to which her tempera- 
ment calls her unerringly, and can no more be 
tempted to range outside her limit of attraction 
than a bee to waste his precious hours dipping 
into bloom that holds no nectar for him. To 
be sure, Miss Guiney's range of attraction is 
wide, but it enlarges its own confines, and does 
not reach out to alien territory. It follows 
as a corollary to this fact that unless one be 
in the range of attraction with Miss Guiney, 
the subjects which claim her thought may be 
more or less alien to him, and the restrained, 
wholly individual manner of her work may be 
equally alien to his nature. He may require 
more warmth, more abandon, more of the ele- 
ment of to-day and to-morrow in the theme and 
mood ; for Miss Guiney has little to do with 
the times and conditions in which she finds 
herself; contemporary life is only incidentally 
in her verse, and one would have difficulty from 
it in declaring: her dav and generation. Her 
poetry demands that synchronism of temper- 
ament by which one responds to her mood 
independent of the time or place to which it 
transports him. 

Take, for illustration, " A Friend's Song for 



Louise Imogen Guiney 77 

Simoisius," with its charm of music, its beauty 
of expression, and its crystal clarity. Few would 
be unconscious of the poetic side of it ; but to 
how many would the subject appeal ? What 's 
Simoisius to them or they to Simoisius that 
they should weep for him ? Let, however, this 
feeling for the atmosphere of myth and legend 
be added, and what charm do the lines take on: 

The breath of dew, and twilight's grace, 

Be on the lonely battle-place ; 

And to so young, so kind a face, 

The long, protecting grasses cling ! 

(Alas, alas, 

The one inexorable thing !) 

In rocky hollows cool and deep, 
The bees our boyhood hunted sleep ; 
The early moon from Ida's steep 
Comes to the empty wrestling-ring, 
(Alas, alas, 
The one inexorable thing !) 

Upon the widowed wind recede 
No echoes of the shepherd's reed, 
And children without laughter lead 
The war-horse to the watering. 
(Alas, alas, 
The one inexorable thing !) 

Thou stranger, Ajax Telamon 1 
What to the loveliest hast thou done, 
That ne'er with him a maid may run 



78 The Younger American Poets 

Across the marigolds in spring? 

(Alas, alas, 

The one inexorable thing !) 

• • • • • 

The world to me has nothing dear 

Beyond the namesake river here : 

O Simois is wild and clear ! 

And to his brink my heart I bring ; 

(Alas, alas, 

The one inexorable thing !) 

The rhyme scheme in this poem has a dis- 
tinct fascination to the ear; there is music in 
the lucid words and in the rhythmic lines, 
climaxing in each stanza, and, moreover, every 
stanza is a picture, with a concrete relation to 
the whole. The poem illustrates several of 
Miss Guiney's characteristics : first, the com- 
pactness of her verse. It is never pirouetting 
merely to show its grace ; in other words, she 
does not let the unity of the idea escape in a 
profusion of imagery. She uses figure and 
symbol with an individual freshness of concep- 
tion, but always that which is structural with 
the thought, so that one can rarely detach a 
stanza or even fugitive lines of her poems with- 
out a loss of value. She develops the theme 
without over-developing it, which is the restraint 
of the artist. The above poem illustrates, also, 
the white light which she throws upon her 



Louise Imogen Guiney 79 

words when clarity and simplicity are demanded 
by the form ; whereas, in sonnets, in her dramatic 
poem, " A Martyr's Idyl," and in other forms 
of verse, her work is sometimes lacking in 
that clear, swiftly communicative quality which 
poetry should possess ; but in her lyric inspira- 
tions, where the form and melody condition the 
diction, one may note the perfect clarity and 
flexibility which she attains, without loss of the 
rare and picturesque word-feeling that belongs 
so inseparably to her. 

The stanzas to " Athassal Abbey," the " Foot- 
note To A Famous Lyric," the delicate " Lilac 
Song," and many others blend the finer qualities 
of word and metre. With the exception of the 
last poem, however, they have not the emo- 
tional warmth that imbues several other of her 
lyrics, as the two " Irish Peasant Songs," which 
are inspirations of sheer beauty, especially the 
first, in its subtlety of race-temperament and 
personal mood, left unanalyzed, — for a further 
hint would destroy it, — but holding spring 
and tears and youth in its wistful word and 
measure : 

I knead and I spin, but my life is low the while, 
Oh, I long to be alone, and walk abroad a mile, 
Yet if I walk alone, and think of naught at all, 
Why, from me that's young, should the wild tears fall? 



80 The Younger American Poets 

The shower-stricken earth, the earth-colored streams, 
They breathe on me awake, and moan to me in dreams, 
And yonder ivy fondling the broke castle-wall, 
It pulls upon my heart till the wild tears fall. 

The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill, 
And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still ; 
But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin's hedges call, 
The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall ! 

It is not surprising that William Black should 
have quoted this poem in one of his volumes, 
for it is certainly one of the most exquisite and 
temperamental of folk-songs. The second is 
wholly different in note, brimming over with 
the exuberance of the Celtic imagination, and 
fresh as the breath of spring which inspires it: 

'Tis the time o' the year, if the quicken-bough be staunch, 
The green, like a breaker, rolls steady up the branch, 
And surges in the spaces, and floods the trunk, and heaves 
In little angry spray that is the under- white of leaves ; 
And from the thorn in companies the foamy petals fall, 
And waves of jolly ivy wink along a windy wall. 

'Tis the time o' the year in early light and glad, 

The lark has a music to drive a lover mad ; 

The downs are dripping nightly, the breathed damps arise, 

Deliciously the freshets cool the grayling's golden eyes, 

And lying in a row against the chilly North, the sheep 

Inclose a place without a wind for tender lambs to sleep. 



Louise Imogen Guiney 81 

The out-of-door atmosphere which Miss 
Guiney has managed to infuse into these lines is 
fairly palpable. What sense of moisture in the 
dew-heavy air is in the second stanza, and what 
elation and buoyancy of returning life vitalizes 
the first! While on this phase of her work 
there is another poem as magnetically charged, 
and full of ozone, but its objective side inci- 
dental to a subjective query which nature and 
science force to the lips: 

The spur is red upon the briar, 

The sea-kelp whips the wave ashore ; 

The wind shakes out the colored fire 

From lamps a-row on the sycamore ; 

The tanager with flitting note 

Shows to wild heaven his wedding-coat ; 

The mink is busy ; herds again 

Go hillward in the honeyed rain ; 

The midges meet. I cry to Thee 

Whose heart 

Remembers each of these : Thou art 

My God who hast forgotten me. 

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound, 
The lined gulls in the offing ride ; 
Along an edge of marshy ground, 
The shad-bush enters like a bride. 
Yon little clouds are washed of care 
That climb the blue New England air, 
And almost merrily withal 
The tree-frog plays at evenfall 
6 



82 The Younger American Poets 

His oboe in a mossy tree. 

So, too, 

Am I not Thine ? Arise, undo 

This fear Thou hast forgotten me. 

From the nature side these lines are pictures, 
taken each by each they are free-hand strokes 
with pigment. Note the picturesque quality, 
for illustration, in the words, 

Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound, 
The lined gulls in the offing ride, 

and their imaginative vision with no hint of 
the fantastic ; for one need only have it glimpsed 
before him to know that he has seen the same 
effect a score of times. Miss Guiney comes to 
the world without, as if no eyes but hers had 
looked upon it; she brings no other image 
upon the lens of her vision, and hence the 
imprint is as newly mirrored, and as fresh 
with each changing view as a moving reflec- 
tion upon the surface of the water. 

The subjective touch in the above poem: 

I cry to Thee, 
Whose heart 

Remembers each of these : Thou art 
My God who hast forgotten me ! — 

articulates the cry which life wrings at some time 
from each of us, noting the infinite solicitude 



Louise Imogen Guiney 83 

that writes self-executing laws in the hearts of 
the creatures, while man goes blundering after 
intimations and dreams. One comes at times 
face to face with the necessity to justify the 
ways of God to man, when he notes through- 
out nature the unerring certainty of instinct, 
and the stumbling fallibility of reason. He 
questions why the bee excels him in wisdom and 
force and persistence, in shaping conditions for 
its maintenance, and in intuitions of destiny; 
or why the infinite exactness that established 
the goings of the ant in the devious ways of 
her endeavor should have left man to follow 
so fatuous a gleam as human intuition in finding 
his own foot-path among the tortuous ways of 
life. And these queries Miss Guiney's poem 
raises, though not with arraignment, rather 
with the logical demand : 

As to a weed, to me but give 

Thy sap ! lest aye inoperative 

Here in the Pit my strength shall be : 

And still, 

Help me endure the Pit until 

Thou wilt not have forgotten me. 

There is sinew and brawn in Miss Guiney's 
work ; she is not dallying in the scented gardens 
of poesy, but entering the tourney in valorous 
emprise. Not a man of them who can meet 



84 The Younger American Poets 

fate in a braver joust than she, and he must 
needs look well to his armor if he come off as 
unscathed. She never stops to bewail the 
prick of the spear, though it draw blood, but 
enters the field again for the 

" Hope not compassed, and yet not void." 

There is tonic in her work for the craven 
heart, a note to shame one back to the ranks. 
Each is a "Recruit" and should take to himself 
this marching order: 

So much to me is imminent : 
To leave Revolt that is my tent, 
And Failure, chosen for my bride, 

And into life's highway be gone 
Ere yet Creation marches on, 
Obedient, jocund, glorified : 

And, last of things afoot, to know 

How to be free is still to go 

With glad concession, grave accord, 

Nor longer, bond and imbecile, 

Stand out against the Gradual Will, 

The guessed ' Fall in ' ! of God the Lord. 

And the plea of Saint George, awaiting the 
hour to essay his quest, 

O give my youth, my faith, my sword, 
Choice of the heart's desire : 
A short life in the saddle, Lord ! 
Not long life by the fire, — 



Louise Imogen Guiney 85 

sets one's sluggish blood in responsive motion, — 
as do the succeeding lines : 



I fear no breathing bowman, 
But only, east and west, 
The awful other foeman 
Impowered in my breast. 
The outer fray in the sun shall be, 
The inner beneath the moon ; 
And may Our Lady lend to me 
Sight of the dragon soon. 

At the outset of her work Miss Guiney sang 
an electrifying song of which men begrudged 
her the glory, being theft of Jove's thunder. 
It was hight valiantly " The Wild Ride," and 
has the spirit of all the knights and troopers 
in Christendom packed within its tense and 
vibrant lines : 

/ hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses, 
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses ; 
All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and 
neighing. 

Let cowards and laggards fall back ! but alert to the 

saddle, 
Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weather-worn galloping 

legion, 
With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves 

him. 



86 The Younger American Poets 

The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and 

morasses ; 
There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal 

or entice us : 
What odds ? we are knights, and our souls are but bent on 

the riding. 

/ hear in my heart, I hear in its o??iinous pulses, 

All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses; 

All ?iight from their stalls, the importunate tramping and 

neighing. 

We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm- wind ; 
We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil, 
Thou leadest, O God ! all 's well with Thy troopers that 
follow ! 

"The Kings" and " The Perfect Hour" are 
other trumpet notes of Miss Guiney's, illustrat- 
ing the individuality of her point of view and 
the personality of her expression. 

A poet's words may be wind-blown feathers, 
or they may be flint-tipped arrows singing to a 
mark. The defect with much of present-day 
poetry is that it is not aimed, it is content to 
be a pretty flight of feathers, blown by the 
breath of fancy, and reaching no vital spot. 

To test Miss Guiney's marksmanship with 
words, one may separate her at once from the 
class who are flying airy illusions nowhither, 
for she concentrates, instead of diffusing, and 



Louise Imogen Guiney 87 

has, at the outset, a definite point in view. She 
works upon the arrow principle, but now and 
again glances from the mark. In such a poem 
as " The Recruit," in " The Wild Ride," or the 
" Saint George " quoted from, in her stirring 
poem " Sanctuary," beginning, 

High above Hate I dwell, 
O storms ! farewell, 

and in many others, she cleaves straight to her 
aim with no deflection. The same may be 
said of many of her lighter poems, the charm- 
ing " Lilac Song," or this delicately wrought 
love-song, speeding to the heart: 

When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken, 
And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar; 

Or when my lattice opens, before the lark has spoken, 
On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning's dying star, 

I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleep- 
ing !) 

Whose great and noonday splendor the many share and see, 
While, sacred and forever, some perfect law is keeping 

The late and early twilight alone and sweet for me. 

In poems of this kind and in deeper ones 
from the spiritual side of her nature, as well as 
in those of valor and daring, she uses such 
words as are tipped with a penetrative point; 
but in some of her sonnets, such as " The 



88 The Younger American Poets 

Chantry," in a narrative poem, such as " The 
Vigil in Tyrone," though not without pictur- 
esque quality, in " The Squall," despite its fre- 
quently fine imagery, and often in the dramatic 
poem, " A Martyr's Idyl," the words are too 
much weighted to carry to the mark; they 
suggest undue care in selection which inter- 
poses between the motive of the poem and the 
sympathy of the reader. One pauses to con- 
sider the words ; and the initial impulse, like a 
spent shell, falls at his feet. Miss Guiney's 
diction is, in the main, peculiarly crisp and ap- 
posite ; but she does not always hold to the 
directness of appeal that distinguishes her 
truest work, but withdraws herself into subtle- 
ties, often beautiful, but too remote. " A Mar 
tyr's Idyl " is a dramatically conceived incident, 
well wrought as to scene and character, and 
having many passages of great beauty ; but the 
effort to keep the expression to the manner of 
the time results in a lack of flexibility in the 
style that is now and then cumbrous. On the 
whole, it is not in a dramatic poem of this sort 
that Miss Guiney best reveals herself, but in 
such inspirations as she has taken — 

Neither from sires nor sons, 
Nor the delivered ones, 
Holy, invoked with awe, 



Louise Imogen Guiney 89 

Her best work answers, by practical demonstra- 
tion, her own query : 

" Where shall I find my light? " 

" Turn from another's track, 
Whether for gain or lack, 
Love but thy natal right. 
Cease to follow withal, 
Though on thine upled feet 
Flakes of the phosphor fall. 
Oracles overheard 
Are never again for thee, 
Nor at a magian's knee 
Under the hemlock tree, 
Burns the illumining word." 

The term " original " is one to be used 
charily and with forethought, but it is one 
that belongs without danger of challenge to 
Miss Guiney's work. There is a distinct qual- 
ity, both of treatment and conception, that is 
hers alone, a rare, unfamiliar note, without 
reminiscent echoes. While it has a certain 
classic quaintness, it has also vitality and con- 
crete forcefulness. 

Her metrical command is varied, and she 
employs many forms with assurance of touch. 
She has a group of Alexandrian songs in A 
Roadside Harp, most of them with beauty of 
measure and atmosphere. Here, in three lines, 
is a rhythmic achievement: 



90 The Younger American Poets 

Me, deep-tress6d meadows, take to your loyal keeping, 
Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping, 
Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reap- 
ing ! 



How the " swish of sickles " conveys their very 
sound ! This ability to put into certain words 
both the music and the picture distinguishes 
Miss Guiney. In her sonnet upon the " Pre- 
Reformation Churches about Oxford," even 
the names that would seem to suggest an in- 
artistic enumeration are made to convey the 
sense of sabbatical sweetness and calm and to 
visualize the scene. 

The Sonnets Written at Oxford mark, as a 
whole, her finest work in this form, although 
the twelve London sonnets are full of strong 
lines and images, and several of them, such as 
" Doves " and " In The Docks," take swift hold 
upon one's sympathy. The former flashes a 
picture at the close, by way of rebuke to the 
over-solicitous mood, which is not only charm- 
ing from the artistic side, but opens the eyes 
in sudden content and gladness. 

Ah, if man's boast, and man's advance be vain, 
And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home, 
And the lone Tree foreknow it, and the Dome, 
The monstrous island of the middle main ; 



Louise Imogen Guiney 91 

If each inheritor must sink again 
Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb 
Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam — 
I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain. 

What folly lies in forecasts and in fears ! 

Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune, 

Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul's 

Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon, 

And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls. 

" God keeps," I said, " our little flock of years." 

This note of spiritual assurance appears 
throughout Miss Guiney's work, speaking in 
her sonnet, " The Acknowledgment," and again 
and again in other poems. She has the mystic's 
passion for the One Good, the One Beauty — 

O hidden, O perfect, O desired, the first and the final 
fair ! — 

and gives it impassioned expression in the lines, 
" Deo Optimo Maximo," 

All else for use, one only for desire ; 

Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee : 
Up from the best, whereof no man need tire, 

Impel Thou me. 

Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by, 
Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer. 

Oft as the morn, (though none of earth deny 
These three are dear,) 



92 The Younger American Poets 

Wash me of them, that I may be renewed, 
Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys ; 

close my hand upon Beatitude ! 
Not on her toys. 

And here at the last is the tenderest Nativity 
song for which dedicated words were ever 
found ; so quaint, so gentle, so reverent, so 
blended of sweet and sad. The second stanza 
is an artist's grouping from life : 

The Ox he openeth wide the doore 

And from the snowe he calls her inne, 

And he hath seen her Smile therefore, 

Our Lady without sinne. 

Now soone from sleepe 

A starre shall leap, 

And soon arrive both King and Hinde ; 

Amen, Amen : 

But O, the place co'd I but find ! 

The Ox hath husht his voyce and bent 

Trewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow, 

And on his lovelie Neck, forspent, 

The Blessed lays her Browe. 

Around her feet 

Full Warme and Sweete 

His Bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell ; 

Amen, Amen : 

But sore am I with Vaine Travel ! 

The Ox is Host in Juda's stall, 
And Host of more than onelie one, 
For close she gathereth withal 



Louise Imogen Guiney 93 

Our Lorde, her littel Sonne : 

Glad Hinde and King 

Their Gyfte may bring, 

But wo'd to-night my Teares were there ; 

Amen, Amen : 

Between her Bosom and His hayre ! 

To sum up Miss Guiney 's work, as well as 
one may, in a sentence, — it has no flaccid 
thought. There is fibre in all she writes ; fibre 
and nerve. Were the fervor and passion which 
she throws into her songs of valor to be diffused 
throughout her verse, making its appeal more 
intimate and personal, she would speak more 
widely, but scarcely to more appreciative readers 
than now delight in her individuality. 



V 
GEORGE E. SANTAYANA 

E A MOTION recollected in tranquillity," 
perfectly defines the work of Mr. 
George Santayana. He is a musing 
philosopher environed by himself. He 

i Shuts himself in with his soul 
And the shapes come eddying forth/ 

shapes that have no being in the world of sense, 
but are rather phantasms materialized in the 
ether of dreams. There is no evidence in 
Mr. Santayana's work that he is living in 
America in the twentieth century — and upon 
his own testimony he is not ; he has withdrawn 
from the importunity of things : 

Within my nature's shell I slumber curled, 
Unmindful of the changing outer skies, — 

and in this inviolate seclusion he enamels the 
pearl with the nacre of his own spirit. 

Mr. Santayana's poet-kinsmen are not to be 
found in contemporary literature ; he is alone 
in the midst of the singers as regards tempera- 



George E. Santayana 95 

ment and attitude toward life. His school is 
that of beauty ; his time that of the gods ; his 
faith the sanctity of loveliness; and his creed 
the restoration of the fair. He would shut out 
all the obtrusive shows of nature and life, and 
dwell in the Nirvana of his own contemplation : 

A wall, a wall around my garden rear, 
And hedge me in from the disconsolate hills ; 
Give me but one of all the mountain rills, 
Enough of ocean in its voice I hear. 
Come no profane insatiate mortal near 
With the contagion of his passionate ills ; 
The smoke of battle all the valleys fills, 
Let the eternal sunlight greet me here. — 

and once enshrined in this Nirvanic close, 
where the strife of living had merged into the 
poise of being, he would repeople the desolated 
earth and air with the forms of his imagination : 

A thousand beauties that have never been 

Haunt me with hope and tempt me to pursue ; 

The gods, methink, dwell just behind the blue ; 

The satyrs at my coming fled the green. 

The flitting shadows of the grove between 

The dryads' eyes were winking, and I knew 

The wings of sacred Eros as he flew, 

And left me to the love of things not seen. 

'Tis a sad love, like an eternal prayer, 

And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease, 

Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase, 



96 The Younger American Poets 

And heaven shines as if the gods were there. 
Had Dian passed, there could no deeper peace 
Embalm the purple stretches of the air. 

It is no exaggeration to say that were Mr. 
Santayana in a cloister, or upon a mid-sea 
island with his books and dreams, he could 
scarcely be less in touch with the passing world 
than he is in the midst of the clamor and 
insistence of modern life, where he keeps the 
tranquillity of the inner silence as if there were 
no voices dinning in his ears. He is subjective 
to the degree of transfusing himself with an- 
other's consciousness, and looking upon his 
own nature from an impersonal standpoint: 

There we live o'er, amid angelic powers, 
Our lives without remorse, as if not ours, 
And others' lives with love, as if our own, — 

says one of the sonnets, imaging the passion- 
stilled world of reflection. 

There is a subtlety in Mr. Santayana's 
processes of thought that demands intuitive 
divination on the part of the reader; there is 
so little objectivity to the idea that its essence 
may almost escape him. His illustrative sym- 
bolism is almost never drawn from nature or 
the world of men and events, but from the 
treasure of beauty at the depth of his spirit, 



George E. Santayana 97 

where, by some mystic chemistry, he has sepa- 
rated all the elements not in harmony with 
him. There must at some time have been 
reaction and repulsion, ferment and explosion, 
in the laboratory of Mr. Santayana's mind ; 
but he awaited the subsidence of the action; 
awaited the period when emotion, thought, and 
learning had distilled and crystallized before 
he shaped them forth before the world. 

This gives to his work a certain fixity both 
of mood and form; his thoughts are as gems 
that flash without heat, not the ruby-hearted, 
passion-dyed gems, but the pale topaz or the 
amber, holding the imprisoned glow of reflec- 
tion. If this may seem to limit Mr. Santayana's 
achievement, it is not so intended, but rather 
to reveal his distinction. He is not only a 
true poet, but one of rare accomplishment; his 
work, however, is for those who are deeply 
subjective, who trance themselves with the 
beautiful as an anodyne for pain; those who 
subordinate to-day to the storied charm of 
yesterday, and look backward to the twilight 
of the gods, rather than forward to the renew- 
ing sunrise. It is not for those whose creed of 
poetry is that it should be all things to all 
men ; that life, in travail to deliver truth, should 
utter its cries through the poet. It is for those 

7 



98 The Younger American Poets 

who know that poetry can no more be adapted 
to all than could the spoken words of a great 
teacher reach equally the diverse minds of a 
multitude whom he might address ; and that 
while it may be the office of one poet to inter- 
pret the struggles, the activities, the aims of 
life, it may be equally the part of another to 
penetrate to that calm at the depth of the 
soul where throes have brought forth peace. 
Not only are there various natures to whom 
poetry speaks, but natures within natures, so 
that all poets speak to different phases of our 
consciousness : some to the mind, — and here 
the range is infinite, — some to the heart, 
and some to the soul, and of the last is Mr. 
Santayana. He is for the meditative hours 
when we are sounding the depths of our- 
selves and come back to the surface of things, 
bringing with us the unsatisfied pain of being. 
Hours when we turn instinctively to a sonnet 
like this to find our mood expressed : 

I would I might forget that I am I, 
And break the heavy chain that binds me fast, 
Whose links about myself my deeds have cast. 
What in the body's tomb doth buried lie 
Is boundless ; 't is the spirit of the sky, 
Lord of the future, guardian of the past, 
And soon must forth to know his own at last. 
In his large life to live, I fain would die. 



George E. Santayana 99 

Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food, 
But calling not his suffering his own ; 
Blessed the angel, gazing on all good, 
But knowing not he sits upon a throne ; 
Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood, 
And doomed to know his aching heart alone. 



The much-mooted, but vaguely understood, 
sub-conscious mind, speaks in this sonnet in 
terms of the conscious. It is a subtle bit of 
philosophy, but not more so than several others 
in the same sequence which show the evolu- 
tion of Mr. Santayana's attitude toward life. 
One may not in a brief space follow out the 
clews to this development, whose beginning 
was in religious emotion : 



My sad youth worshipped at the piteous height 

Where God vouchsafed the death of man to share ; 

His love made mortal sorrow light to bear, 

But his deep wounds put joy to shamed flight, 

And though his arms outstretched upon the tree, 

Were beautiful, and pleaded my embrace, 

My sins were loth to look upon his face. 

So came I down from Golgotha to thee, 

Eternal Mother ; let the sun and sea 

Heal me, and keep me in thy dwelling-place. 

The succeeding sonnet traces the winding of 
the new way, the reluctance, the 



ioo The Younger American Poets 

. . . many farewell pious looks behind, 
And dumb misgivings where the path might wind, 
And questionings of nature, as I went, — 

which every life duplicates as it leaves its well- 
guarded walls of belief and ventures out upon 
undiscovered ways. The pain of letting go the 
old, the loneliness of the new, the alien look of 
all the heights that encompass one, and the 
psychology of that impulse by which one is 
both impelled to retrace his way and withheld 
from it, — are suggested by the sonnet. In 
the next occurs one of Mr. Santayana's finest 
lines, the counsel 

To trust the soul's invincible surmise. 

It would be difficult to define intuition more 
succinctly than this. It is not, as less subtle 
poets would have put it, the soul's assurance 
that one is to trust; this would be to assume, 
for what assurance have we but that which Mr. 
Santayana has so subtly termed the " invincible 
surmise " ? 

Lines which lead one out into speculative 
thought are frequent in Mr. Santayana's son- 
nets. His philosophy is constructive only in 
so far as it unifies a succession of moods and 
experiences ; but it is pregnant with suggestion 



George E. Santayana 101 

to a psychological mind. One of the sonnets 
which questions : 

Of my two lives, which should I call the dream ? 
Which action vanity? which vision sight? — 

after declaring that 

Some greater waking must pronounce aright 

and blend the two visions to one seeing, 
continues : 

Even such a dream I dream, and know full well 
My waking passeth like a midnight spell, 
But know not if my dreaming breaketh through 
Into the deeps of heaven and of hell. 
I know but this of all I would I knew : 
Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true. 

The thought in this passage is elusive, but it 
is more than a play upon words. It is another 
way of putting the question, which shall be 
trusted, which shall become the reality, the 
objective or the subjective world ? One knows 
that his " waking," his sense perception, is tran- 
sitory, that it apprehends but the present, which 
"passeth like a midnight spell," but how far 
does the other and finer sight penetrate 
Into the deeps of heaven and of hell? 

No answer from the void to this query, but by 
the mystical conclusion that 

Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true. 



102 The Younger American Poets 

In simpler phrase, unless the vision and convic- 
tion are to be trusted, unless, to revert to Mr. 
Santayana's former words, the soul's "invincible 
surmise " be taken as truth, that which we know 
as truth is but a phantasm. 

The sonnet sequence is the intimate record 
of an individual soul in its evolving spiritual 
life, and has the significance belonging only to 
art which interprets a personality, an experi- 
ence, in whose development one finds some 
clew to his own labyrinth. It reveals the many 
phases of speculation, reflection, questioning, 
through which one passes in the transition 
from beliefs indoctrinated in the mind at its 
earliest consciousness, to convictions which 
follow thought liberated by life, by intimacy 
with nature, and by recognition of its own 
spiritual authority. It is the winning of this 
conviction, with its attendant seeking and un- 
rest, allayed by draughts from the wayside 
springs of beauty, memory, and imagination, 
— which comprises the record of the first 
sontoet sequence, whose conclusions, as " strewn 
thoughts" springing along the way, are gath- 
ered into a final chaplet for the brows of the 
" Eternal Mother," Nature, whose peace he 
sought when he came down from Golgotha, 
and whose larger meaning, synonymous with 



George E. Santayana 103 

the primal freedom of the soul, is conveyed 
in the sonnet: 

These strewn thoughts, by the mountain pathway sprung, 

I conned for comfort, till I ceased to grieve, 

And with these flowering thorns I dare to weave 

The crown, great Mother, on thine altar hung. 

Teach thou a larger speech to my loosed tongue, 

And to mine opened eyes thy secrets give, 

That in thy perfect love I learn to live, 

And in thine immortality be young. 

The soul is not on earth an alien thing 

That hath her life's rich sources otherwhere ; 

She is a parcel of the sacred air. 

She takes her being from the breath of Spring, 

The glance of Phoebus is her fount of light, 

And her long sleep a draught of primal night. 

Aside from Mr. Santayana's philosophical 
sonnets he has a second sequence, upon love, 
which, too, is philosophically tinged. In the 
matter of beauty this is perhaps the more fin- 
ished and artistic work; but I have chosen rather 
to dwell upon the subtlety of his speculations 
in those phases of thought less universally 
treated of by poets than is love. It has not 
been possible, however, to follow the sequence 
in its order, or to present more than certain 
individual notes of its philosophy. 

Thus far it has been the matter, rather than 
the manner, of Mr. Santayana's verse that has 
been considered; but before glancing at the 



104 The Younger American Poets 

later sonnet sequence, what of his touch upon 
the strings of his instrument ? One can scarcely 
have followed the extracts quoted without not- 
ing the mellow suavity, the ease, the poise of 
his work. There is everywhere assurance of 
expression, nothing tentative, nothing halting. 
His lines are disposed by the laws of counter- 
point into well-ordered cadences where nothing 
jars ; his words are rich and mellifluous, in short, 
he has, as a sonneteer, a finish, a classical com- 
mand of the vehicle reminiscent of Petrarch and 
Camoens. The sonnet is, by the nature of the 
case, a somewhat inadaptable instrument, and 
yet it is susceptible of great individuality, as 
one may note by recalling an intricate sonnet 
by Rossetti and a sweeping, sonorous one by 
Milton. The criticism which is, perhaps, most 
apposite to Mr. Santayana's sonnets is that 
they are " faultily faultless ; " they are so finished 
that one would welcome a false note now and 
then, that suggested a choke in the voice, or a 
heart-beat out of time. 

There is an atmosphere about all of Mr. 
Santayana's work that conveys a sense of 
wandering in the moonlight; it is tempered, 
softened, stilled ; it is like an Isis-veil cast over 
the eyes ; but at times one becomes oppressed 
with the consciousness of himself, and of the 



George E. Santayana 105 

impalpable visions glimpsed in the wan light, 
and longs to snatch the veil away and flee to the 
garish world again. One may seek Mr. San- 
tayana's poetry when his mood demands it, and 
it will be as a cooling hand in fever; but when 
the pulse of being is low, and one needs the 
touch to vitalize, he must turn to others, for 
Mr. Santayana's work is not charged with the 
electricity that thrills. 

Because he is not inventive in metre nor 
sufficiently light in touch, Mr. Santayana is not 
a lyrist. He has scarcely any purely lyrical 
verse in his collections, and what is contained 
in them is too lacking in spontaneity to be 
classed with his best work. It is not wanting 
in lines of beauty and in English undeflled ; but 
the sense of tone and rhythm, except of the 
smoothly conventional sort, is absent. There 
are no innovations in form and the impulse is 
too subdued for a true lyric. That called " Mid- 
night " has more warmth than the others. 
Several of his odes in the Sapphic metre 
have great charm, especially the first. His ele- 
giac verse has often rare elevation of thought ; 
but it, also, has too set a measure, too much 
of the " formed style " to be vital. It brings 
well-conceived, well-imaged thought, as in this 
stanza : 



106 The Younger American Poets 

How should the vision stay to guide the hand, 
How should the holy thought and ardour stay, 

When the false deeps of all the soul are sand, 
And the loose rivets of the spirit, clay ? 

but it rarely shocks one into thinking for him- 
self. 

In relation to diction, there are few Ameri- 
can writers who use English of such purity 
and finish as does Mr. Santayana ; but it 
is the scholar's English, the English drawn 
from familiarity with the great masters and 
models, and hence lacks the creative flexibility, 
the quick, warm, ductile adaptability, that a 
much less accomplished poet may give to 
his words. It keeps to the accepted canons, 
the highest, the purest, and uses the con- 
secrated words of literature with an artist's 
touch; but the racy idiom, the word which 
some daring poet coined yesterday in an ex- 
igent moment — with these it has naught to do. 

Mr. Santayana has several dramatic poems, 
u The Hermit of Carmel," " The Knight's Re- 
turn," and a dialogue between Hermes and 
Lucifer, in which the latter relates the details 
of his banishment from heaven for his daring 
arraignment and interrogation of God. The 
dialogue has little dramatic coloring ; one hear- 
ing it read aloud would have difficulty in de- 



George E. Santayana 107 

termining from the outward change of expres- 
sion and personality where Lucifer leaves off 
speaking and Hermes begins, but it puts into 
the mouth of Lucifer some words full of the 
challenge of thought, and speaks through both 
some beautiful fantasies, such as this reply of 
Lucifer to Hermes' question as to the state of 
bliss in which the angels dwell : 

A doubtful thing 
Is blessedness like that. . . . 
Their raptured souls, like lilies in a stream 
That from their fluid pillow never rise, 
Float on the lazy current of a dream. 

Mr. Santayana has not written " The Hermit 
of Carmel " or " The Knight's Return " with a 
theatrical manager in view. They are stories 
told in verse, tales of gentle melancholy, pleasant 
to the ear; but when all is said, one returns to 
his sonnets as the true expression of his nature 
and the consummation of his gifts. He is a son- 
neteer, by every phase of his temperament and 
every canon of his art. His work in all other 
forms is cultivated, philosophical, finely finished, 
but pervaded by an atmosphere of cultured con- 
ventionality ; whereas in the sonnet he finds a 
medium whose classic distinction and subtlety 
are so harmonized to his nature and his charac- 
teristic mode of thought, that it becomes to him 



108 The Younger American Poets 

the predestined expression. A glance, then, in 
closing, at the flexile phrases, the psychological 
analyses of the later sonnet sequence, turning 
chiefly upon love. 

But, first, let me cite from one of the earlier 
sonnets, an image drawn from this theme, a 
jewel-like flash of beauty, not to be overlooked. 
The first line of the metaphor is commonplace ; 
but note the succeeding ones : 

Love but the formless and eternal Whole 
From whose effulgence one unheeded ray 
Breaks on this prism of dissolving clay 
Into the nickering colors of thy soul. 

This is defining the individual spirit in exqui- 
site terms. 

The second sequence teems with beautiful 
passages, now and again with a note of the 
trovatore, as in the sestett of this sonnet: 

Yet why, of one who loved thee not, command 
Thy counterfeit, for other men to see, 
When God himself did on my heart for me 
Thy face, like Christ's upon the napkin, brand? 
O how much subtler than a painter's hand 
Is love to render back the truth of thee ! 
My soul should be thy glass in time to be, 
And in my thought thine effigy should stand. 
Yet, lest the churlish critics of that age 
Should flout my praise, and deem a lover's rage 



George E. Santayana 109 

Could gild a virtue and a grace exceed, 
I bid thine image here confront my page, 
That men may look upon thee as they read, 
And cry : " Such eyes a better poet need ! " 

This has art and charm, but in contrast note 
the impassioned nobility of utterance which im- 
bues the one that follows. Here are lines of 
pure emotion and beauty : 

We needs must be divided in the tomb, 

For I would die among the hills of Spain, 

And o'er the treeless, melancholy plain 

Await the coming of the final gloom. 

But thou — O pitiful ! — wilt find scant room 

Among thy kindred by the northern main, 

And fade into the drifting mist again, 

The hemlocks' shadow, or the pines' perfume. 

Let gallants lie beside their ladies' dust 

In one cold grave, with mortal love inurned ; 

Let the sea part our ashes, if it must, 

The souls fled thence which love immortal burned, 

For they were wedded without bond of lust, 

And nothing of our heart to earth returned. 

Such sonnets as this mark Mr. Santayana 
as a master of this form, and while his other 
work has value, it is as a sonneteer that he 
has made his really individual contribution to 
literature. 




VI 

JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY 

BEAUTIFUL and delicate art is that 
of Miss Josephine Preston Peabody, 
but somewhat elusive of analysis, so 
much is its finer part dependent upon the in- 
tuition which one brings to it ; for Miss Peabody 
is a poet-mystic, sensitive to impressions from 
which the grosser part has slipped away, — im- 
pressions which come to her clothed upon with 
a more ethereal vesture than the work-a-day 
garment of thought, — and while she would fain 
reveal their hidden import, they often elude 
her and grow remote in the telling, as if fearful 
of betraying too openly their secret. 

Her first volume, The Wayfarers, revealed 
at the outset a poet's imagination, and a tech- 
nique so finished that it had already the touch 
of the artist, but its vision was that of the novice 
who looks at the morning from beneath her 
white veil and wonders at the world of sin and 
strife and passion whose pain has never reached 
her. It was the work of one who had not yet 



Josephine Preston Peabody m 

met her revealing crisis, not yet been identified 
to herself, of one reaching out after truth with 
the filament of fancy until the ductile thread 
had often been spun too far before it found 
anchorage. The volume was, in short, an ex- 
quisite conjecture as to life, whose bafHing, 
alluring mystery only now and again flashed 
upon her an unveiled glance of its eyes. This 
is not, however, to say that the conjecture was 
vain ; indeed, the initial poem, " The Wayfarers," 
in which, perhaps, it was most definitely em- 
bodied, is a thoughtful, suggestive song holding 
many truths worth pondering, and in phrasing 
and technique wrought with so much grace 
that it might stand beside any work of the later 
volumes. Indeed, this statement is apposite to 
nearly all the work in the first collection, which 
in that regard presents an unusual distinction, 
having from the first on its technical side a 
maturity that seemed not to belong to the ten- 
tative work of a young poet ; it was, however, 
over-ornate, lacking directness and simplicity, 
and inclining to excess of elaboration in theme, 
so that one often became entangled in the weft 
of poetic artifice and lost the clew of thought. 
Take as a random illustration the followine 
stanzas from the poem entitled " The Weavers," 
under which Miss Peabody symbolizes the elu- 



ii2 The Younger American Poets 

sive hopes and fancies that come by night, 
weaving their weft of dreams : 

Lo, a gray pallor on the loom 
Waxeth apace, — a glamourie 
Like dawn outlooking, pale to see 
Before the sun hath burst to bloom ; 
Wan beauty, growing out of gloom, 
With promise of fair things to be. 

• • • • • 

The shuttle singeth. And fair things 
Upon the web do come and go ; 
Dim traceries like clouds ablow 
Fade into cobweb glimmerings, 
A silver, fretted with small wings, — 
The while a voice is singing low. 

Of the eight remaining stanzas several are 
equally lacking in anything that may be 
grasped, and while there is a certain art in 
imaging the elusive fancies which the weavers 
bring, there should be some more definite 
fancy or ideal to embody, rather than the 
mere intent to make beautiful lines. This 
is, perhaps, an extreme instance of the over- 
elaboration of the first volume, though it dis- 
tinguishes the long poem which gives its name 
to the collection, and appears in many of the 
lyrics. 

Miss Peabody is an inventive metrist, and 
her sense of rhythm is highly developed, or 



Josephine Preston Peabody 113 

rather it is innately correct, being manifest 
with equal grace in the first collection ; wit- 
ness the music of these stanzas from " Spin- 
ning in April " : 

Moon in heaven's garden, among the clouds that wander, 
Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways, 
Whiten, bloom not yet, not, yet, within the twilight yonder; 
All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days. 

Oh, my heart has two wild wings that ever would be flying ! 
Oh, my heart 's a meadow-lark that ever would be free ! 
Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying; 
Well it is the little wheel must turn all day for me ! 

All the hill-tops beckon, and beyond the western meadows 
Something calls me ever, calls me ever, low and clear : 
A little tree as young as I, the coming summer shadows, — 
The voice of running waters that I ever thirst to hear. 

Oftentime the plea of it has set my wings a-beating ; 
Oftentime it coaxes, as I sit in weary wise, 
Till the wild life hastens out to wild things all entreating, 
And leaves me at the spinning-wheel, with dark, unseeing 
eyes. 

The poem has several other stanzas equally 
charming, but which detract from the artistic 
structure of the song by over-spinning the 
thought. 

Among the simple, sincere lyrics which pre- 
vail more by their feeling than mechanism, 

are " One That Followed," " Horizon," " Dew- 

8 



ii4 The Younger American Poets 

Fall," " Befriended," " The Song of A Shep- 
herd-Boy at Bethlehem," and the two stanzas 
called, " After Music," whose intimate beauty 
renders them personally interpretative. 

I saw not they were strange, the ways I roam, 

Until the music called, and called me thence, 
And tears stirred in my heart as tears may come 
To lonely children straying far from home, 

Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence. 

If I might follow far and far away 

Unto the country where these songs abide, 
I think my soul would wake and find it day, 
Would tell me who I am, and why I stray, — 
Would tell me who I was before I died. 

There is a mystical touch here in note with 
the opening reference to the subtlety of Miss 
Peabody's sources of inspiration. 

In the first volume is also a sonnet from the 
heart and to the heart, for who has not known 
the weariness that comes of long striving to 
image, or interpret the beautiful, and yet is 
loth to commit his unfulfilled dream to the 
oblivion of sleep. The sonnet is called, " To 
the Unsung." 

Stay by me, Loveliness ; for I must sleep. 
Not even desire can lift such wearied eyes; 
The day was heavy and the sun will rise 
On day as heavy, weariness as deep. 



Josephine Preston Peabody 115 

Be near, though you be silent. Let me steep 
A sad heart in that peace, as a child tries 
To hold his comfort fast, in fingers wise 
With imprint of a joy that 's yet to reap. 
Leave me that little light ; for sleep I must, 
— And put off blessing to a doubtful day — 
Too dull to listen or to understand. 
But only let me close the eyes of trust 
On you unchanged. Ah, do not go away, 
Nor let a dream come near, to loose my hand. 

Altogether, Miss Peabody 's first book of 
verse revealed strength, feeling, and imagi- 
nation, though tentative in its philosophy, as 
the initial work of a young poet must neces- 
sarily be, and having but a slight rooting 
in life. 

The second volume, Fortune and Mens 
Eyes, opens with a cleverly written one-act 
play, turning upon an adventure of two maids 
of honor at Elizabeth's court, with Master W. 
S., a player, whose identity is not far to seek, 
and William Herbert, son of the Earl of Pem- 
broke, the scene being laid at the tavern of the 
Bear and the Angel, whither Mistress Anne 
Hughes and Mary Fyton have resorted on a 
merry escapade under cover of seeing the 
people celebrate the fete of the Bear. 

The atmosphere of the time is well repro- 
duced, the dialogue of the tapsters cleverly 



n6 The Younger American Poets 

done, and the final scene between the Player 
and Mary is full of dramatic intensity. 

In her second volume, Miss Peabody has 
also a dramatic monologue called, " The 
Wingless Joy," which, though now and 
again Browningesque in tone, has many felici- 
tous images and shows a true insight into 
human motive. 

The lyrics in the second volume form a less 
important part of the collection, though there 
are several, such as " The Source," " The Sur- 
vivor," " Psyche in the Niche," and " In the 
Silence," which rank with Miss Peabody's 
best work, particularly the last, illustrating 
the truth that the Spirit manifests at the 
need, even the dumb and undivining need, 
and not alone at the call : 

Where did'st Thou tarry, Lord, Lord, 

Who heeded not my prayer? 
All the long day, all the long night, 

I stretched my hands to air. 

" There was a bitterer want than thine 

Came from the frozen North ; 
Laid hands upon my garment's hem 

And led me forth. 

" It was a lonely Northern man, 

Where there was never tree 
To shed its comfort on his heart, 

There he had need of me. 



Josephine Preston Peabody 117 

" He kindled us a little flame 

To hope against the storm ; 
And unto him, and unto me, 

The light was warm." 

And yet I called Thee, Lord, Lord — 

Who answered not, nor came : 
All the long day, and yesterday, 

I called Thee by Thy name. 

" There was a dumb, unhearing grief 

Spake louder than Thy word, 
There was a heart called not on me, 

But yet I heard. 

" The sorrow of a savage man 

Shaping him gods, alone, 
Who found no love in the shapen clay 

To answer to his own. 

" His heart knew what his eyes saw not ; 

He bade me stay and eat ; 
And unto him, and unto me, 

The cup was sweet. 

" Too long we wait for thee and thine, 

In sodden ways and dim, 
And where the man's need cries on me 

There have I need of him. 

" Along the borders of despair 

Where sparrows seek no nest, 
Nor ravens food, I sit at meat, — 

The Unnamed Guest," 



n8 The Younger American Poets 

Before leaving the second volume there is 
one other poem of which I cannot refrain from 
quoting a part, to show the subtlety with which 
a phase of the psychology of sentiment has 
been grasped and analyzed in these lines called 
"The Knot": 

Oh, I hated me, 
That when I loved you not, yet I could feel 
Some charm in me the deeper for your love : 
Some singing-robe invisible — and spun 
Of your own worship — fold me silverly 
In very moonlight, so that I walked fair 
When you were by, who had no wish to be 
The fairer for your eyes ! But at some cost 
Of other life the hyacinth grows blue, 
And sweetens ever. ... So it is with us, 
The sadder race. I would have fled from you, 
And yet I felt some fibre in myself 
Binding me here, to search one moment yet — 
The only well that gave me back a star, — 
Your eyes reflecting. And I grew aware 
How worship that must ever spend and burn 
Will have its deity from gold or stone ; 
Till that fain womanhood that would be fair 
And lovable, — the hunger of the plant — 
Against my soul's commandment reached and took 
The proffered fruit, more potent day by day. 

And the lines which follow close with the 
wholly feminine query, 

Will you not go ? — and yet, why will you go ? 



Josephine Preston Peabody 119 

It is a human bit of dramatic analysis, and 
reduces inconsistent femininity to a common 
denominator. 

In her third volume, Marlowe, a drama, 
founded upon the life of the lovable but erratic 
poet and playwright, Miss Peabody essayed an 
ambitious undertaking, but one which, as litera- 
ture, carries its full justification. As drama, 
one must qualify. In characterization, aside 
from Marlowe himself, who comes before one 
vividly, there is a lack of sharp definition. 
Nashe, Lodge, Peele, and Green, Marlowe's fel- 
low playwrights and friends, might, from the 
evidence of the dialogue, be the same character 
under different names, so alike are they in 
speech and temperament. Next to Marlowe 
himself, Bame, who through jealousy becomes 
his enemy, and brings on the final tragedy, is 
the most individually drawn. Of the women 
characters, the drama presents practically but 
one, — Alison, the little country maid who loves 
Marlowe secretly, and becomes in a way his 
good angel, — as " Her Ladyship " of the Court, 
object of his adoration, is introduced but twice 
in the play, and that veiled, so that only for a 
moment at the last may one see the beauty 
that — under guise of Helen — inspired Mar- 
lowe's lines : 



120 The Younger American Poets 

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships 
And burned the topless towers of Ilium ! 

While the two brief comings of " Her Lady- 
ship" impart an artistic touch of mystery, it is to 
be doubted if in a play so intangible a heroine 
could become a vital factor, and if she were not, 
the woman element of the drama must be sus- 
tained wholly by Alison, the little " Quietude," 
who, until the one beautiful scene with Marlowe 
after her marriage, remains an artless undevel- 
oped child, with too little color, too weak a 
human pulse-beat, to compel interest and 
sympathy. She is delicately drawn, in her un- 
sophisticated sweetness and purity, and the 
inner strength of her nature is finely shown at 
the last, but up to this period of revelation one 
does not feel her; she lacks the touch of life 
essential to a character in drama. 

In plot the work presents somewhat the same 
limitation. It is, until the two final scenes, 
after Marlowe's downfall, literature without 
action : nothing happens in the earlier part of 
the play to create an element of suspense fore- 
looking to the developments at the close. 
Marlowe's triumphs are detailed to one another 
by his friends, but they are not shown in some 
great scene where he might receive the accla- 
mations of the people and so contrast sharply 



Josephine Preston Peabody 121 

with his downfall at the end : story suffices for 
action. The sentiment of the play presents 
also no intricacies : Alison, although loving 
Marlowe, is not for a moment a factor of love 
in his life, since he neither suspects her attach- 
ment nor reciprocates it, and hence the jealousy 
of her suitors has no effect either upon him or 
upon the supposed audience. " Her Lady- 
ship " is not pitted against Alison, since the 
latter knows that Marlowe's heart is given to his 
veiled divinity ; hence there are no complexities 
arising from the love-element. For the pur- 
pose of acting, therefore, the play seems to me 
to lack movement, suspense, variety of charac- 
terization, and, except in the drawing of Mar- 
lowe, definiteness of type. It has, however, a 
strong and vivid scene at the close, leading 
up to and including Marlowe's tragic death, 
and a scene of rare beauty and of intense 
dramatic reality, of which I shall speak later, 
in the visit of Marlowe to Alison after his 
downfall. 

On the side of literature, the drama contains 
work of admirable strength and quality, work 
that in its beauty of phrase and subtlety of 
penetration is not unworthy to be put into the 
mouth of Marlowe of the " mighty line." Miss 
Peabody never falls into the Shakespearizing 



122 The Younger American Poets 

strain which many writing of that epoch as- 
sume ; her dialogue is vivid, direct, and full of 
original imagery, as when Marlowe speaks of 
Alison as having for him — 

Snowflake pity, 
Destined to melt and lose itself in fire 
Or ever it can cool my tongue, 

and thus describes her: 

Why, she was a maid 
Of crystalline ! If you looked near enough, 
You 'd see the wonder changing in her eyes 
Like parti-colored marvels in a brook, 
Bright through the clearness ! 

Note now in contrast the impassioned words in 
which he pictures his divinity : 

Hers is the Beauty that hath moved the world 
Since the first woman. Beauty cannot die. 
No worm may spoil it. Unto earth it goes, 
There to be cherished by the cautious spring, 
Close folded in a rose, until the time 
Some new imperial spirit comes to earth 
Demanding a fair raiment ; and the earth 
Yields up her robes of vermeil and of snow, 
Violet- veined — beautiful as wings, 
And so the Woman comes ! 

And this beautiful passage addressed to her 
after the triumph of " Faustus " : 



Josephine Preston Peabody 123 

Drink my song. 
Grow fair, you sovran flower, with earth and air ; 
Sip from the last year's leaves their memories 
Of April, May, and June, their summer joy, 
Their lure for every nightingale, their longing. 

And finally these words spoken to her in 
splendid scorn, after his downfall and her 
rejection : 

I took you for a Woman, thing of dust, — 
I — I who showed you first what you might be ! 
But see now, you were hollow all the time, 
A piece of magic. Now the air blows in, 
And you are gone in ashes. 

At once the most beautiful and artistically 
drawn scene is that previously referred to, in 
which Marlowe, his star in eclipse, visits Alison 
after her marriage. Here is a dramatic situa- 
tion, human and vital, and Miss Peabody has 
developed it with rare feeling and skill. The 
picture of Marlowe in his disgrace and de- 
spondency, coming to the woman who had 
believed in him, and whose love had shone 
upon his unseeing eyes, is drawn with fine 
delicacy and pathos. In the flash of revela- 
tion that comes to him from her white spirit, 
he speaks these words : 

Thou hast heard 
Of Light that shined in darkness, hast thou not? 
And darkness comprehended not the Light? 



124 The Younger American Poets 

So. But I tell thee why. It was because 
The Dark, a sleeping brute, was blinded first, 
Bewildered at a thing it did not know. 

Have pity on the Dark, I tell you, Bride. 
For after all is said, there is no thing 
So hails the Light as that same blackness there, 
O'er which it shines the whiter. Do you think 
It will not know at last ? — it will not know ? 

Those, too, are noble passages, though too 
long to quote, in which Marlowe unburdens 
his overcharged heart to Alison, and intrusts 
to her faith the keeping of that higher self she 
had divined in him ; and when Marlowe, early 
in the scene, referring to his misfortunes, says : 

You do not know 
The sense of waking down among the dead, 
Hard by some lazar-house, — 

note the hidden meaning in Alison's reply : 

Nay ; but I know 
The sense of death. And then to rise again 
And feel thyself bewildered, like a spirit 
Out of the grave-clothes and the fragment strewings. 

Passages of subtle significance, wistful, tender, 
and pathetic, distinguish this scene. 

Miss Peabody has visualized Marlowe clearly 
wherever he appears, and created him as the 
lovable, impulsive, generous-spirited, but ill- 



Josephine Preston Peabody 125 

starred genius that he was. It is a life -study, 
in its conflicts, its overthrown ideals, its ap- 
pealing humanity, and should take its place as 
one of the permanent interpretations of his 
character. 

Many of her critics have found in Miss Pea- 
body's latest volume, The Singing Leaves, an 
inspiration and charm exceeding that of her 
former work, and in delicacy, lyrical ease, sim- 
plicity, and ideality it must be accounted one 
of her truest achievements ; but there is about 
the volume an impalpability, an airy insubstan- 
tiality, which renders it elusive and unconvinc- 
ing. The mystical subtlety hitherto noted in 
Miss Peabody's work has, in the latest volume, 
grown, until many of the poems have so little 
objectivity that they float as iris-tinted flecks of 
foam upon the deep of thought. They have 
beauty of spirit, beauty of word ; but their mo- 
tive is so subtle, their thought so intangible, 
that while they charm one in the reading, they 
have, with a few exceptions, melted into vapor, 
gone the way of the foam, when once the eye 
has left them. One feels throughout the vol- 
ume an ingenuous simplicity, a naivete, that is, 
in many of her poems, exceedingly charming, 
but which, becoming the pervasive note of the 
collection, communicates to it a certain artificial 



126 The Younger American Poets 

artlessness, as if June, disregarding the largess 
of the rose, yearned back to April and the 
violet ; in short, the poems seem to me, with a 
few exceptions, to lack moving, vital impulse, 
and to bring few warmly imbued words from 
life. They are as the pale moon-flower, grow- 
ing in the stillness of dreams, rather than the 
rose dyed with the blood of the heart. 

But what is, to me, the limitation of the 
volume, — its over-subtilized mood and lack of 
definite, moving purpose, — must, to many of 
its readers, be granted to be its distinction ; 
and for their very impalpability these delicate 
Leaves, that vibrate with impulse as ethereal as 
that which moves the aspen when the wind is 
still, have for many the greater charm. 

To glance, then, at some of the finer achieve- 
ments of the volume, one finds among the 
lyrics several turning upon love that catch in 
artistic words an undefined mood, such as 
" Forethought " and "Unsaid," or in captivat- 
ing picture-phrase, a blither fancy, such as 
" The Enchanted Sheepfold," or, stronger 
and finer than these, that vision of love called 
" The Cloud," which enfolds truth and wraps 
the heart in its whiteness. One can scarcely 
fancy a more exquisite bit of imagery in which 
to clothe the thought of these lines : 



Josephine Preston Peabody 127 

The islands called me far away, 

The valleys called me home. 
The rivers with a silver voice 

Drew on my heart to come. 

The paths reached tendrils to my hair 

From every vine and tree. 
There was no refuge anywhere 

Until I came to thee. 

There is a northern cloud I know, 

Along a mountain crest. 
And as she folds her wings of mist, 

So I could make my rest. 

There is no chain to bind her so 

Unto that purple height ; 
And she will shine and wander, slow, 

Slow, with a cloud's delight. 

Would she begone ? She melts away, 

A heavenly joyous thing. 
Yet day will find the mountain white, 

White-folded with her wing. 

And though love cannot bind me, Love, 

— Ah no ! — yet I could stay 
Maybe, with wings forever spread, 

— Forever, and a day. 

Here is delicacy enshrining one of the deeper 
truths of life. 

Many of the lyrics have a seventeenth-cen- 
tury lilt, but not of imitation. There are no 
echoes in Miss Peabody's song, its note, measure, 



128 The Younger American Poets 

and spirit are entirely her own, and a random 
stanza would carry its identification, so indi- 
vidual is her touch. Of the seventeenth-cen- 
tury mood, however, are " The Song Outside," 
"Forethought," "The Top of the Morning," 
" The Blind One," and other poems. 

Nearly all the lyrics in The Singing Leaves 
are very brief, showing, in their compactness 
and restrained use of imagery, just the opposite 
method from that prevailing in Miss Peabody's 
first book, The Wayfarers. So marked is the 
contrast that, but for the personality imbuing 
them, they might have been written by another 
hand. Whereas the diction also in the earlier 
work inclined to beauty for its own sake, the 
reaction to its present simplicity is the more 
marked. It is doubtless for this reason that 
many of the poems carry with them a note 
of conscious ingenuousness, as if their simplest 
effects had been deliberately achieved. Not 
so, however, such poems as " The Inn," " The 
Drudge," "Sins," "The Anointed," "The 
Walk," whose words are quick with native 
impulse, as the trenchant lines of the third ; 

A lie, it may be black or white ; 

I care not for the lie : 
My grief is for the tortured breath 

Of Truth that cannot die. 



Josephine Preston Peabody 129 

And cruelty, what that may be, 

What creature understands? 
But O, the glazing eyes of Love, 

Stabbed through the open hands ! 

Two poems contained in The Singing Leaves 
are of a note far more serious and vital than 
that of their fellows : the first, " The Ravens ; " 
the second, and to my thinking, the more im- 
portant, " The Fool," which from the stand- 
point of strength, feeling, forceful expression, 
idealism, and the portrayal of human nature, 
seems to me the achievement of the book. 
It holds a truth bitten in with the acid of 
experience : 

O what a Fool am I ! — Again, again, 

To give for asking: yet again to trust 
The needy love in women and in men, 

Until again my faith is turned to dust 
By one more thrust. 

How you must smile apart who make my hands 
Ever to bleed where they were reached to bless ; 

— Wonder how any wit that understands 
Should ever try too near, with gentle stress, 
Your sullenness ! 

Laugh, stare, deny. Because I shall be true, — 
The only triumph slain by no surprise : 

True, true, to that forlornest truth in you, 

The wan, beleaguered thing behind your eyes, 
Starving on lies. 

9 



130 The Younger American Poets 

Build by my faith ; I am a steadfast tool : 
When I am dark, begone into the sun. 

I cry, ' Ah, Lord, how good to be a Fool : — 
A lonely game indeed, but now all done ; 
— And I have won ! ' 

Here speaks a word from life worth a score 
of " Charms : To Be Said In The Sun," or 
other fanciful unreality ; and because of such 
poems as this, fibred in human motive, one 
feels by contrast in many of the others that 
Miss Peabody has been playing with her genius, 
casting "Charms" and "Spells," which are 
mere poetic sorcery. 

Miss Peabody has a rare sympathy with child- 
life, and her group of poems of this nature 
could not well be bettered. With the excep- 
tion of a line now and then which may be a 
bit beyond the expression of a child, they are 
fidelity itself to the moods that swayed The 
Little Past "Journey," "The Busy Child," 
and " The Mystic " are among the best, though 
none could be spared, unless, perhaps, " Cakes 
and Ale." Still another with the true child- 
feeling is that called " Late," — a tender little 
song which, because of its brevity, must suffice 
to represent the group: 

My father brought somebody up, 
To show us all asleep. 



Josephine Preston Peabody 131 

They came as softly up the stairs 
As you could creep. 

They whispered in the doorway there 

And looked at us awhile, 
I had my eyes shut up, but I 

Could feel him smile. 

I shut my eyes up close, and lay 

As still as I could keep ; 
Because I knew he wanted us 

To be asleep. 

Miss Peabody 's work, considered in its en- 
tirety, is distinguished by an art of rare grace 
and delicacy, by imagination and vision, suscep- 
tibility to the finer impressions, and by an ever- 
present ideality; and while it lacks somewhat 
the element of personal emotion and passion, 
it has a sympathy subtle and spiritual, if less 
intimate in its revealing. 




VII 

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS 

R. CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS 

presents so marked an example of 
evolution in the style of his work 
and the sources of his inspiration, that he 
has from volume to volume, like the nautilus, 
" changed his last year's dwelling for the new," 
and having entered the " more stately man- 
sion " has " known the old no more." 

The first chamber which he fashioned for 
himself in the House of Art could not long 
contain him, as its walls were built of myths 
and traditions, incapable of further expansion. 
This was the period of Orion a7id Other Poems, 
such as " Ariadne," " Memnon, " and " Launce- 
lot And The Four Queens," work done prior 
to 1880 and creditable to the initial effort of 
a young collegian. 

The second lodging was scarcely more 
permanent ; though structured less in myth, 
and showing a gain in workmanship, it was 
still too narrow a dwelling for an expanding 
spirit, and did little more than give foretokens 



Charles G. D. Roberts 133 

of that which should succeed it. The volume 
contained, however, one admirable composition, 
one that remains as vital and apposite as when 
it was written, — the stirring stanzas to Canada. 
Indeed, the fine courage, the higher loyalty 
that distinguishes this appeal, lifts it from the 
mere grandiloquent utterance of a young man 
with over-hasty convictions, to a noble arraign- 
ment, and leads one to wonder why other 
poets of her domain do not turn their pens 
to revealing her to herself as does this fine 
utterance. 

Mr. Roberts' third volume, Songs of the 
Common Day, bore almost no relation to its 
predecessors, and might have been the work of 
a different hand, as regards both subject and 
style. Legend and myth had wholly disap- 
peared, and experience had begun to furnish the 
raw material, the flax, for the poet's spindle and 
distaff which earlier effort had been making 
ready. Not yet, however, had the work the 
virility and tang that smack in the very first 
line of its successor, The Book of the Native. 
It was graceful, artistic singing, but lacking, 
except in a few instances, the large free note 
that sounds in the later work. Among its 
lyrics is one of exquisite tenderness, as sad and 
sweet as Tennyson's " Break, break, break," and 



134 The Younger American Poets 

in the sifting of the volume, this remains, per- 
haps, the sand of gold : 

Grey rocks and greyer sea, 
And surf along the shore — 

And in my heart a name 

My lips shall speak no more. 

The high and lonely hills 

Endure the darkening year — 

And in my heart endure 
A memory and a tear. 

Across the tide a sail 

That tosses and is gone — 
And in my heart the kiss 

That longing dreams upon. 

Grey rocks and greyer sea, 
And surf along the shore — 

And in my heart the face 
That I shall see no more. 

The simplicity and pathos of this lyric render 
it unforgettable. 

" The Tide on Tantramar," from the third 
volume, a ballad of the sea and the salt marshes, 
transfers to the page the keen pungence of the 
brine, as do the descriptive stanzas of Tantra- 
mar used illustratively in the " Ave " to Shelley. 
There is noble work in this elegy, and while 
it wanders over a good deal of Canadian terri- 
tory, making inspired observations of nature 






Charles G. D. Roberts 135 

before it discloses their relation to the subject 
— when the comparison is reached it is appo- 
site, and the poem shows an insight into the 
character of Shelley that is gratifying, in view of 
the vagueness usually associated with his name. 
Other Songs of the Common Day, forelook- 
ing to the later poet, are " The Silver Thaw," 
" Canadian Streams," and " The Wood Frolic," 
having the first-hand, magnetic touch distin- 
guishing every line of Mr. Roberts' out-of-door 
verse in that volume which first truly reveals 
him, — The Book of the Native. So conscious 
is one of a new force in this book that it would 
seem to represent another personality. Its 
opening poem, " Kinship," turns for inspiration, 

Back to the bewildering vision 

And the border-land of birth ; 
Back into the looming wonder, 

The Companionship of Earth, 

and puts the query to nature : 

Tell me how some sightless impulse,, 

Working out a hidden plan, 
God for kin and clay for fellow, 

Wakes to find itself a man. 

Tell me how the life of mortal, 
Wavering from breath to breath, 

Like a web of scarlet pattern 
Hurtles from the loom of death. 



136 The Younger American Poets 

How the caged bright bird, Desire, 
Which the hands of God deliver, 

Beats aloft to drop unheeded 
At the confines of forever. 

Faints unheeded for a season, 
Then outwings the farthest star, 

To the wisdom and the stillness 
Where thy consummations are. 

This sounds the keynote to The Book of 
the Native, which is equally concerned with 
the enigmas of the soul and the mysteries of 
nature. The questing spirit is abroad in it; 
the unquenched faith, the vitality, the hidden 
import of life is in it; and while its meta- 
physics do not go to the point of developing a 
definite philosophy, they set one to thinking for 
himself, which is a better service. " Origins," 
a speculation as to our coming from "the enig- 
matic Will," and the " Unsleeping," a vision of 
the Force brooding over life, — are among the 
strongest poems of this motive. To cite the 

second : 

I soothe to unimagined sleep 
The sunless bases of the deep, 
And then I stir the aching tide 
That gropes in its reluctant side. 

I heave aloft the smoking hill : 
To silent peace its throes I still. 
But ever at its heart of fire 
I lurk, an unassuaged desire. 



Charles G. D. Roberts 137 

I wrap me in the sightless germ 
An instant or an endless term ; 
And still its atoms are my care, 
Dispersed in ashes or in air. 

I hush the comets one by one 
To sleep for ages in the sun ; 
The sun resumes before my face 
His circuit of the shores of space. 

The mount, the star, the germ, the deep, 
They all shall wake, they all shall sleep. 
Time, like a flurry of wild rain, 
Shall drift across the darkened pane. 

Space, in the dim predestined hour, 
Shall crumble like a ruined tower. 
I only, with unfaltering eye, 
Shall watch the dreams of God go by. 

What a fine touch in the lines declaring that 

Time, like a flurry of wild rain, 
Shall drift across the darkened pane ! 

Mr. Roberts has the rare pictorial gift of 
flashing a scene before one without employing 
an excess of imagery, and never that which is 
confused or cumbrous. His style is nervous, 
magnetic, direct, and has, in his later work, 
very little superfluous tissue. This statement, 
has, of course, its exceptions, but is suffi- 
ciently accurate to be made a generalization, 
and in no case is it better shown than in the 



138 The Younger American Poets 

descriptive poems of the Canadian country in 
The Book of the Native, What is there about 
Canada that sets the blood of her poets a-tingle 
and lends magic to their fingers when writing 
of her ? What is there in Grand Pre's " bar- 
ren reaches by the tide," or in the marshes of 
Tantramar, that such a spell should wait upon 
them, calling the roamer 

" Back into the looming wonder, 
The Companionship of Earth " ? 

With the American poets of the present day, 
despite their feeling for nature, it is rather 
her beauty in the abstract than any particular 
locality with which they chance to be as- 
sociated, that inspires them, — though Mr. 
Cawein, in his allegiance to Kentucky, fur- 
nishes a marked exception to this statement, 
— but the Canadian poets, with a passion like 
that of a lover, sing of the haunts that knew 
their first devotion : now with a buoyant in- 
fectious note, now with a reminiscent sadness; 
in short, the Canadian poets seem to have a 
sympathetic identity with their country, an in- 
terchange of personality by which they recipro- 
cally express each other. 

Particularly is this true of Bliss Carman, 
Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G. D. 



Charles G. D. Roberts 139 

Roberts; and it was equally true of Archibald 
Lampman, whose untimely passing lost to 
Canada one of her anointed singers, to whose 
high promise justice has hardly yet been done. 
To illustrate Mr. Roberts' nature-sympathy, 
and susceptibility to the mood of the year, let 
me put in contrast parts of two poems from The 
Book of the Native. The first belongs to the 
racy note pervading a good deal of the nature- 
verse of to-day, of which the Vagabondia books 
set the fashion : it is called " Afoot," but might 
with equal aptness be named the " Proces- 
sional," since the second is the " Recessional " : 

Comes the lure of green things growing, 
Comes the call of waters flowing, — 

And the wayfarer desire 
Moves and wakes and would be going. 

Hark the migrant hosts of June 
Marching nearer noon by noon ! 
Hark the gossip of the grasses 
Bivouacked beneath the moon ! 

Hark the leaves their mirth averring ; 
Hark the buds to blossom stirring ; 
Hark the hushed, exultant haste 
Of the wind and world conferring ! 

Hark the sharp, insistent cry 
Where the hawk patrols the sky ! 

Hark the flapping, as of banners, 
Where the heron triumphs by ! 



140 The Younger American Poets 

Note the picturesque phrase and the compul- 
sive, quickstep note in the lines above, as of 
the advancing cohorts of spring, and in con- 
trast the slow movement, the sadness of the 
retreating year, in these beautiful " Recessional " 
stanzas : 

Now along the solemn heights 
Fade the Autumn's altar-lights ; 

Down the great earth's glimmering chancel 
Glide the days and nights. 

Little kindred of the grass, 
Like a shadow on a glass 

Falls the dark and falls the stillness ; 
We must rise and pass. 

We must rise and follow, wending 

Where the nights and days have ending, — 

Pass in order pale and slow, 
Unto sleep extending. 

Little brothers of the clod, 
Soul of fire and seed of sod, 

We must fare into the silence 
At the knees of God. 

Little comrades of the sky, 
Wing to wing we wander by, 

Going, going, going, going, 
Softly as a sigh. 

And to make the season-cycle complete, and 
also to show the delicacy of imagination with 



Charles G. D. Roberts 141 

which Mr. Roberts invests every changing 
aspect of his well-loved outer world, here are 
two stanzas on " The Frosted Pane " : 

One night came Winter noiselessly, and leaned 

Against my window-pane. 
In the deep stillness of his heart convened 

The ghosts of all his slain. 

Leaves, and ephemera, and stars of earth, 

And fugitives of grass, — 
White spirits loosed from bonds of mortal birth, 

He drew them on the glass. 

Fancies as exquisite as this bespeak the true 
poet. " The Trout Brook " and " The Solitary 
Woodsman " are other inspirations as individual. 

Mr. Roberts' fifth volume, New York Noc- 
turnes, as its name implies, was a decided de- 
parture from his former work, showing his 
versatility, but what is more to the purpose, 
his recognition of the dramatic element, the 
human, vital poetry in the babel of the streets. 
One could wish that the Nocturnes penetrated 
more profoundly into the varied phases of life 
in the great seething city, that, in short, they 
sounded other deeps than those of love ; but 
Mr. Roberts has succeeded in conveying that 
sense of isolation in a throng, that heavy lone- 
liness and reaction, throwing one back upon 



142 The Younger American Poets 

his own spiritual personality, which belongs to 

the bewildering city night, and from which the 

finer companionships of love arise as a refuge 

and need. 

The Nocturnes have the city's over-soul 

incarnate in them ; for in the last analysis, the 

commerce, the art, the ambition, the strife, the 

defeat, that one may term the city's life, are 

but as hands and feet to minister to the spirit 

of love. The first of the Nocturnes suggests 

this : 

I walk the city square with thee, 
The night is loud ; the pavements roar • 
Their eddying mirth and misery 
Encircle thee and me. 

The street is full of lights and cries : 
The crowd but brings thee close to me, 
I only hear thy low replies ; 
I only see thine eyes. 

The "Nocturne of Consecration" is impas- 
sioned and full of spirituality; it is, however, too 
long to quote, which is unfortunately the case 
with the " Nocturne of the Honeysuckle," an- 
other of the finer poems. " At the Station " is 
instinct with movement, reproducing the picture 
of the swiftly changing throngs, and conveying 
the eager expectancy of the hour of meet- 
ing. The Nocturnes have also a group of mis- 



Charles G. D. Roberts 143 

cellaneous poems, and the volume as a whole, 
while less virile than The Book of the Native, 
owing to the difference in theme, is distin- 
guished by refinement of feeling and artistry. 

In The Book of the Rose Mr. Roberts has 
done some excellent work, and some, alas, that 
strikes a decided note of artificiality. The 
least real and convincing of the poems is that 
called " On the Upper Deck, " which opens the 
volume. The first stanza is subtly phrased, 
and also the lyric which occurs midway of the 
poem; but the dialogue between the lovers 
is honeyed poetizing rather than genuine emo- 
tion. I find few heart-throbs in it, but rather a 
melodramatic sentimentality from whose flights 
one is now and again let down to the common 
day with summary despatch, as in the paren- 
thetical clause of the stanza which follows : 

Let us not talk of roses. Don't you think 
The engine's pulse throbs louder now the light 
Has gone ? The hiss of waters past our hull 
Is more mysterious, with a menace in it? 
And that pale streak above the unseen land, 
How ominous ! a sword has just such pallor ! 
(Yes, you may put the scarf around my shoulders.) 
Never has life shown me the face of beauty 
But near it I have seen the face of fear. 

It may be that an obtuse man upon the deck 
of a steamer would interrupt his sweetheart's 



144 The Younger American Poets 

flight of poesy to envelop her in a shawl, but 
the details of the matter may well be left to the 
imagination. It is doubtless one of those pas- 
sages which seem to a writer to give reality to 
a picture, but afterward smile at him sardon- 
ically from the printed page. Mr. Roberts in- 
clines elsewhere in the same poem to be too 
explicit ; after a most exalted declaration, he 
says: 

No, do not move ! Alone although we be 
I dare not touch your hand ; your gown's dear hem 
I will not touch lest I should break my dream 
And just an empty deck-chair mock my longing. 

Here again it was scarcely necessary to qualify 
the chair, and indeed the whole passage savors 
of melodrama. These are, however, only such 
lines as show that to the one relating a matter 
the least incident may appear to lend reality to 
the setting, whereas to the reader the detail 
may violate taste. 

The opening stanza, mentioned as one of the 
truly subtle bits of the poem in question, has 
these fine lines: 

As the will of last year's wind, 
As the drift of the morrow's rain, 
As the goal of the falling star, 
As the treason sinned in vain, 



Charles G. D. Roberts 145 

As the bow that shines and is gone, 
As the night cry heard no more, — 
Is the way of the woman's meaning 
Beyond man's eldest lore. 

This stanza and the lyric below, which is sung 
as an interlude to the dialogue, go far toward 
redeeming the over-ripe sentiment of the poem : 

O Rose, blossom of mystery, holding within your deeps 
The hurt of a thousand vigils, the heal of a thousand 

sleeps, 
There breathes upon your petals a power from the ends of 

the earth, 
Your beauty is heavy with knowledge of life and death and 

birth. 

O Rose, blossom of longing — the faint suspense, and the 

fire, 
The wistfulness of time, and the unassuaged desire, 
The pity of tears on the pillow, the pang of tears unshed, — 
With these your spirit is weary, with these your beauty is 

fed. ' 

The remaining poems of the volume are 
much more artistic than the first, with the 
exception of the passages last quoted. " The 
Rose of Life " is artistically wrought as to 
form and metre, and subtle in analysis; but, 
because of its length and that it voices some- 
what the same thought as the lyric above, the 

former must serve to show with what delicacy 

10 



146 The Younger American Poets 

of interpretation he approaches a theme so well 
worn, but ever new, as that of the rose. It is 
chiefly on the symbolistic side that Mr. Roberts 
considers the subject; and while one may 
feel that the sentiment cloys at times when a 
group of poems using the rose as an image are 
bracketed together, this is the chief criticism 
of the volume, as the lyrics following the open- 
ing poem, " On the Upper Deck," have both 
charm and art, and one hesitates between such 
an one as, " O Little Rose, O Dark Rose," and 
the one immediately following it, " The Rose of 
My Desire." This, perhaps, has a more com- 
pelling mood, though no greater charm of touch 
than the other: 



O wild, dark flower of woman, 

Deep rose of my desire, 
An Eastern wizard made you 

Of earth and stars and fire. 

When the orange moon swung low 

Over the camphor-trees, 
By the silver shaft of the fountain 

He wrought his mysteries. 

The hot, sweet mould of the garden 
He took from a secret place 

To become your glimmering body 
And the lure of your strange face. 



Charles G. D. Roberts 147 

From the swoon of the tropic heaven 

He drew down star on star, 
And breathed them into your soul 

That your soul might wander far — 

On earth forever homeless, 

But intimate of the spheres, 
A pang in your mystic laughter, 

A portent in your tears. 

From the night's heat, hushed, electric, 

He summoned a shifting flame, 
And cherished it, and blew on it 

Till it burned into your name. 

And he set the name in my heart 

For an unextinguished fire, 
O wild, dark flower of woman, 

Deep rose of my desire ! 

Metrically the poem jars in the line, 
And breathed them into your soul, 

departing as it does from the general scheme 
of the third lines, and rendering it necessary to 
make "soul" bisyllabic in order to carry the 
metre smoothly, and in accord with its com- 
panion verses. " Spirit " would have fitted the 
metrical exigency better, leaving the final un- 
accented syllable as in the majority of the lines, 
but would not have lent itself to repetition 
in the succeeding line as does "soul," — so 



148 The Younger American Poets 

" who shall arbitrate " ? Mr. Roberts rarely 
offends the ear in his metres, but instead his 
cadences are notably true. 

Aside from the poems upon love, filling the 
first division of The Book of the Rose it has 
a miscellaneous group, of which the two that 
best represent it, to my fancy, are so widely 
diverse that their mere mention in juxtaposition 
is amusing ; nevertheless they are the lines " To 
An Omar Punch Bowl," and the reverent Nativ- 
ity Song, " When Mary, the Mother, Kissed the 
Child." The haunting couplets of the former 
are by no means of the convivial sort, but the 
essence of memory and desire, the pathos of 
this dust that is but "wind that hurries by," — 
is in them. However, to be quoted, they need 
their full context, as does the Nativity Song 
mentioned. 

Mr. Roberts has a rare sympathy with child- 
hood, and a gift of reaching the hearts of the 
little ones ; the " Sleepy Man " and " Wake-up 
Song" could scarcely be improved; note the 
picturing in the former and the drowsihood in 
its falling cadences : 

When the Sleepy Man comes with the dust on his eyes 

(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!) 
He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies. 

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !) 



Charles G. D. Roberts 149 

He smiles through his fingers, and shuts up the sun ; 

(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!) 
The stars that he loves he lets out one by one. 

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !) 

He comes from the castles of Drowsy-boy Town ; 

(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary !) 
At the touch of his hand the tired eyelids fall down. 

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !) 

• • • • • 

Then the top is a burden, the bugle a bane, 

(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary !) 
When one would be faring down Dream-a-way Lane. 

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !) 

When one would be wending in Lullaby Wherry 

(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary !) 
To Sleepy Man's Castle by Comforting Ferry. 

(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie !) 

Mr. Roberts has collected his several volumes, 
exclusive of The Book of the Rose, into one, 
eliminating such of the earlier work as falls short 
of his standard of criticism, and adding new 
matter showing growth and constantly broaden- 
ing affinity with life. He manifests more and 
more the potentialities of his nature, and while 
all of his later work does not ring equally true, 
the majority of it is instinct with sincerity and 
high idealism, and one may go to it for unforced, 
unconventional song, having art without tram- 
mels, for a breath of the ozone of nature, and 



150 The Younger American Poets 

for suggestive thoughts upon life and the 
things of the spirit. Its creed is epitomized in 
the following lines, pregnant with suggestion 
to the votary of Art, the creed of the idealist, 
and yet the truer realist : 

Said Life to Art : I love thee best 

Not when I find in thee 
My very face and form, expressed 

With dull fidelity. 

But when in thee my longing eyes 

Behold continually 
The mystery of my memories 

And all I crave to be. 



VIII 
EDITH M. THOMAS 

4N earnest idealist is Miss Edith Thomas, 
/-\ who commits to her song a vital word 
and sends it as a courier to arouse that 
drowsy lodge-keeper, the soul, and bid him 
give ear to the importunate message of life. 
Not by outwardly strenuous numbers, however, 
is this end achieved ; on the contrary, Miss 
Thomas is a quiet singer whose thoughtful 
restraint is one of her chief distinctions. The 
spiritual tidings which she intrusts to her song 
are destined to be delivered in the silence of 
the soul ; none the less are they sent to 
awaken it, and none the less do they bide and 
knock at the door of one's spirit until one rise 
and open to them. 

The ideality of her work has been from the 
outset its most informing quality ; the thoughts 
beyond the thrall of words that pass, in Maeter- 
linck's phrase, " like great white birds, across 
the heart," had brushed with their unsullied 
wings the thoughts of every-day and left a 
light upon them, giving assurance, when the 



152 The Younger American Poets 

art was still unshapen, that the vision had 
been revealed. One seldom reads a poem 
by Miss Thomas without bringing away from 
it a suggestive thought or a spiritual stimulus, 
sometimes introduced so subtly that it breaks 
upon one in the after-light of memory rather 
than at the moment of reading; for Miss 
Thomas is not a homiletic singer, obtruding 
the moral. She is too much the artist for that. 
She delivers no crass counsel, does no obvious 
and commonplace moralizing ; but she has the 
nature that resolves every phase of life into its 
spiritual elements, and, seen imaginatively, 
these elements are material for Art. When 
once they are wrought into song by Miss 
Thomas, they have lost none of the force of 
the original idea, none of the thought-giving 
value ; but into them has been infused the 
spiritual value in a subtly philosophical way, 
by which the experience is resolved into its 
personal import to the soul. 

Miss Thomas has written many beautiful 
lyrics, but her characteristic expression is too 
thoughtful to be set to the lighter and more 
purely musical rhythms. She has a finely culti- 
vated style, inventive in form, and often em- 
ploying richly cadenced measures, but one feels 
rather that the cadence is well tested, the 



Edith M. Thomas 153 

form well fitted to the theme, than that the 
impulse created its own form and sang itself 
into being. One cannot, however, generalize 
upon such varied work as that of Miss Thomas. 
Because one feels back of the work the thinker, 
the analyst, weighing even the emotion in the 
balance of reflection, is not to say that the 
work is cold or unemotional ; on the contrary, 
it is deeply human and sympathetic, and in 
such inspirations as are drawn directly from 
life it is often highly impassioned ; but in many 
of the poems the motive is drawn from some 
classic source, such as, " At Seville," " Ulysses 
at the Court of Alcinous," " The Roses of 
Pieria," " Timon to the Athenians," " The Voice 
of the Laws," being Socrates' reply to Crito, — 
and while each of these poems, and particularly 
the last, has both beauty and strength, they nat- 
urally lack the warmth and impulse that ac- 
company more personal themes. 

As compared with the large body of Miss 
Thomas' work, that for which the inspiration 
has been sought far afield is slight ; but it is 
sufficient to set the mark of deliberate intent 
upon many of the poems and detract from 
the spontaneity of the work as a whole. Miss 
Thomas is so accomplished and ready a tech- 
nician that the temptation to utilize such allu- 



154 The Younger American Poets 

sions and themes from literature as have 
artistic possibilities, is a strong one ; nor is it 
one to be deprecated, except in the ultimate 
tendency that one shall let the inspiration from 
without take precedence of that within, thus 
quenching one's own creative faculty. With 
Miss Thomas such a result is far distant, if not 
impossible, for life is to her the vital reality, 
and the majority of her themes are drawn from 
its passing drama; but there is also the other 
phase of her art, and a sufficiently prominent 
one to be noted. Her work falls under two 
distinct heads, — poetry of the intellect and 
poetry of the heart, — and while her most emo- 
tional verse has a fine subtlety of thought, and 
her most intellectual a subtlety of emotion, 
making them not crassly one or the other, 
none the less is the distinction apparent, and 
it is easy to put one's hand upon the work into 
which her own temperament has entered and 
which her creative moods have shaped. Upon 
Art itself she has written some of her most 
luminous poems, holding genius to be one with 
that force by which 

The blossom and the sod 
Feel the unquiet God, 

and exclaiming to a doubting votary, 



Edith M. Thomas 155 

Despair thine art ! 
Thou canst not hush those cries, 
Thou canst not blind those eyes, 
Thou canst not chain those feet, 
But they a path shall beat 

Forth from thine heart. 

Forth from thine heart ! 
There wouldst thou dungeon him, 
In cell both close and dim — 
The key he turns on thee, 
And out he goeth free ! 

Despair thine art ! 

In her poem, " The Compass," she carries the 
reasoning farther, and declares that if one is to 
wait upon the Force within and give it freedom, 
he shall also be trusted to follow where it leads, 
knowing that if temporarily deflected it will 
adjust itself to the truth as surely as the com- 
pass, thrown momentarily out of poise, searches 
and finds its compelling attraction. Aside 
from the analogy in the lines, the dignity of 
their movement, the harmonious fall of the 
caesura, and the fine blending of word and tone, 
render them highly artistic : 

Touch but with gentlest finger the crystal that circles the 

Mariner's Guide — 
To the East and the West how it drifts, and trembles, and 

searches on every side ! 



156 The Younger American Poets 

But it comes to its rest, and its light lance poises only one 

self-same way 
Since ever a ship spread her marvellous sea-wings, or plunged 

her swan-breast through the spray — 

For North points the needle ! 

Ye look not alone for the sign of the lode-star ; the lode- 
stone too lendeth cheer ; 

Yet one in the heavens is established forever, and one is 
compelled through the sphere. 

What ! and ye chide not the fluttering magnet that seemeth 
to fly its troth, 

Yet even now is again recording its fealty's silent oath — 
As North points the needle ! 

Praise ye bestow that, though mobile and frail as a tremu- 
lous spheret of dew, 

It obeys an imperial law that ye know not (yet know that it 
guideth most true) ; 

So, are ye content with its fugitive guidance — ye, but the 
winds' and waves' sport ! — 

So, are ye content to sail by your compass, and come in fair 
hour to your port ; 

For North points the needle ! 

And now, will ye censure, because, of compulsion, the spirit 

that rules in this breast, 
To show what a poet must show, was attempered, and 

touched with a cureless unrest, 
Swift to be moved with all human mutation, to traverse 

passion's whole range ? 
Mood succeeds mood, and humor fleets humor, yet never 

heart's drift can they change, 

For North points the needle ! 






Edith M. Thomas 157 

Inconstant I were to that Sovereign Bidding (why or whence 

given unknown), 
Failed I to tent the entire round of motive ere sinking back 

to my own : 
The error be yours, if ye think my faith erring or deem my 

allegiance I fly ; 
I follow my law and fulfil it all duly — and look ! when your 

doubt runneth high — 

North points the needle ! 

These lines illustrate Miss Thomas' command 
of accurately descriptive phrase : the compass is 
"mobile and frail as a tremulous spheret of 
dew," and touched never so lightly, " how it 
drifts, and trembles, and searches on every side." 
One feels that just these words, and no others, 
convey at once the sense of its delicacy, and 
the almost sentient instinct by which it seeks 
its attraction. Miss Thomas' diction in general 
shows rather fineness of discrimination in the 
expressive value of words than a strenuous 
attempt to seek out those which are " literary " 
and inobvious. There is rarely a word that 
calls undue attention to itself; but when a 
passage or poem is analyzed, one cannot but note 
the fine sense of values in its phraseology. Her 
diction has elegance without conventionality, 
but one would scarcely say that it is highly 
temperamental. It is flexible, colorful, pictur- 
esque, but has not so strong a note of personality 



158 The Younger American Poets 

that one meeting a poem of Miss Thomas' by 
chance would be able to identify it by its evi- 
dence of word and phrase, as one may often do 
in the work of a poet. Miss Thomas' marked 
individuality is rather in the essence of her 
work, its motive, mood, and thought, than in 
its distinctive style, which is too varied to be 
recognized by its touch. 

Now and again in her earlier work the influ- 
ence of Emerson comes out unmistakably. " A 
Reed Shaken With the Wind," "Child and 
Poet," and " The Naturalist," are distinctly 
Emersonian in manner and atmosphere — the 
first especially so in its consecutive, unstanzaed 
lines, and in the note pervading it. Whatever 
mannerisms of style Miss Thomas acquired 
from Emerson were, however, quickly cast off ; 
but with his thought she could scarcely fail to 
have a continued kinship, if not a debt, so 
much does her own work incline to the spirit- 
ually philosophical. One may not trace influ- 
ences at all definitely in her work, though felt 
in its general enrichment and breadth. In 
" Palingenesis," from her last collection, she has 
done what poets before her have done, — em- 
body in song the theory of evolution ; but it has 
rarely been done better than in these stanzas, 
which seize the spiritual side of the scientific 



Edith M. Thomas 159 

fact and fuse it with the imagination. It has 
been shudderingly foreboded that in this baldly 
practical age the poet would come singing of 
science ; but if he invest it with the life and 
charm that pervade Miss Thomas' incursion 
into the realm, there is no immediate cause for 
alarm. Indeed, a scientific truth, seen through 
the lens of a poet's imagination, often takes on 
a beauty that no conception of fancy could 
duplicate, witness Whitman's line : 

Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful 
boatmen, 

from a poem upon the same theme which 
inspires Miss Thomas' stanzas : 

I dwelt with the God, ere He fashioned the worlds with their 

heart of fire, 
Ere the vales sank down at His voice or He spake to the 

mountains, u Aspire ! " 
Or ever the sea to dark heaven made moan in its hunger for 

light, 
Or the four winds were born of the morning and missioned 

on various flight. 

In a fold of His garment I slept, without motion, or knowl- 
edge, or skill, 
While age upon age the thought of creation took shape at 
His will ; 



160 The Younger American Poets 

Part had I not in the scheme till He sent me to work on the 

reef. 
Nude, in the seafoam, to clothe it with coralline blossom and 

leaf. 
Patient I wrought — as a weaver that blindly plyeth the 

loom, 
Nor knew that the God dwelt with me, there as I wrought in 

the gloom. 

Strength had I not till chiefdom supreme of the waters He 

gave; 
Joyous I went — tumultuous ; the billows before me I drave — 
Myself as a surge of the sea when impelled by the driving 

storm j 
Nor knew that the God dwelt with me, there in leviathan's 

form. 

Lightness I had not till, decked with light plumes, He endued 

me with speed — 
Buoyant the hollow quill as the hollow stem of the reed ! 
And I gathered my food from the ooze, and builded my 

home at His word ; 
Nor knew that the God dwelt with me clothed in the garb of 

a bird. 

I trod not the earth till on plains unmeasured He sent me to 

rove, 
To taste of the sweetness of grass and the leaves of the 

summer grove. 
For shelter He hollowed the cave ; fresh springs in the rock 

He unsealed ; 
But I knew not the God dwelt with me that ranged as a 

beast of the field. 
Foresight I had not, nor memory, nor vision that sweeps in 

the skies, 



Edith M. Thomas 161 

Till He made me man, and bade me uplift my marvelling 

eyes ! 
My hands I uplifted — my cries grew a prayer — on the 

green turf I knelt, 
And knew that the God had dwelt with me wherever of old 

I had dwelt ! 

Wild is the life of the wave, and free is the life of the air, 

And sweet is the life of the measureless pastures, unbur- 
dened of care ; 

They all have been mine, I upgather them all in the being 
of man, 

Who knoweth, at last, that the God hath dwelt with him 
since all life began ! 

My heritage draw I from these — I love tho' I leave 

them behind ; 
But shall I not speak for the dumb, and lift up my sight for 

the blind? 
I am kin to the least that inhabits the air, the waters, the 

clod; 
They wist not what bond is between us, they know not the 

Indwelling God ! 
For under my hands alone the charactered Past hath He 

laid, 
One moment to scan ere it fall like a scroll into ashes and 

fade! 
Enough have I read to know and declare — my ways He will 

keep, 
If onward I go, or again in a fold of His garment I sleep ! 

There is no internal evidence in these 

strongly phrased and stirring lines that a 

woman's hand penned them ; their vigor, grasp, 

ii 



1 62 The Younger American Poets 

and resonant freedom of measure would do 
credit to Browning ; and here one may pause 
to observe the adaptability of Miss Thomas' 
style to her thought. In certain poems de- 
manding the delicate airy touch, such as, " Dew- 
Bells," Titania herself could scarcely speak in 
lighter phrase, nor could a tenderer, sweeter 
note be infused into a poem than has been put 
into the lines : " The soul of the violet haunts 
me so," or into the poem incident to the 
query, "Is it Spring again in Ohio?" — but 
when the thought demands virility of word and 
measure Miss Thomas has a vivid energy of 
style, masculine in its force. One may argue 
that there is no sex in poetry, that, coming close 
home for illustration, a woman's hand might 
have fashioned the work of Longfellow and 
Whittier ; but what of Lowell, Whitman, and 
Emerson ? These names alone prove sex- 
evidence in art ; nor is any disparagement 
meant to Longfellow and Whittier that their 
characteristic notes were of the gentler, sweeter 
sort. We know they could be sufficiently ro- 
bust upon occasion, particularly the latter; but, 
in general, art obeys a temperamental polarity 
giving evidence of the masculine or feminine 
mind that produced it. Miss Thomas' work 
in the main proves the woman, and the typical 



Edith M. Thomas 163 

woman, who has lived, suffered, joyed ; drank, 
indeed, the brimming beaker from the foam to 
the lees ; but on her more philosophical and 
intellectual side, in such poems as " The Voice 
of the Laws," or " The Flutes of the Gods " and 
in many others, she has all a man's virility. It 
is partly for this reason that her style is too 
varied to be identified by a random poem, the 
temperamental differences in the work are so 
marked, and the style changes so entirely 
with them, as to elude classification under 
one head. 

For one of her heartening notes and quick- 
step measures take " Rank-And-File " from her 
last volume, The Dancers : 

You might have painted that picture, 

I might have written that song : 
Not ours, but another's, the triumph, 

'T is done and well done — so 'long ! 

You might have fought in the vanguard, 
I might have struck at foul Wrong : 

What matters whose hand was the foremost? 
'T is done and well done — so 'long ! 

So 'long, and into the darkness, 

With the immemorial throng — 
Foil to the few and the splendid : 

All 's done and well done — so 'long ! 



164 The Younger American Poets 

Yet, as we pass, we will pledge them — 
The bold, and the bright, and the strong, 

(Ours was never black envy) : 
All 's done and well done — so 'long ! 

Miss Thomas is very keen to see what may be 
termed the subjectively dramatic side of life, — 
all the subtlety of motive and impulse working 
out of sight to shape the destiny, she sees with 
acute divination ; but constructively she lacks 
the dramatic touch. In " A Winter Swallow," 
her one definite incursion into this field, it can- 
not be said that she has done such work as 
would represent her at her real value either in 
the literary beauty of the lines, or in the insight 
displayed in the characterization. 

So short a dramatic effort, however, could 
scarcely do more than indicate the likelihood or 
unlikelihood of Miss Thomas' success in a more 
sustained plot; and while a theme having in itself 
warmer elements of sympathy would doubtless 
create for itself a more moving and vital art, there 
is very little to indicate that the effort would be 
wisely spent. One is inclined more fully to 
this opinion by the lack of dramatic impulse 
in Miss Thomas' narrative poem turning upon 
the story of Genevra of the Amieri, she who 
woke by night from the death-trance to find 
herself entombed in the powerful vault of 



Edith M. Thomas 165 

her ancestors, and, being spurned from her 
father's and her husband's doors, as a haunting 
spirit, took refuge at that of her former lover, 
to whom, being adjudged by the law as dead, 
she was reunited. 

The mere skeleton of this story is palpitant 
with life; but in Miss Thomas' cultivated and 
beautiful recital, wherein the well-rounded, 
suave pentameter falls never otherwise than 
richly on the ear, all the vibrant, thrilling, ter- 
rifying elements of the story have been refined 
away. When Genevra wakens in the tomb, and 
touches in the darkness the human skeletons 
about her, and struggles to free herself from 
the entangling cerements, and beats with 
superhuman strength at the gratings until they 
yield to her hand, and to the outer stone 
until it unseals at her terrified touch, — there 
are dramatic materials which even history has 
infused with red blood ; but either Miss Thomas 
does not conceive the situation as having thrills 
and terrors, or has not been able to impart 
them to her record, for she sums the matter up 
in these two stanzas, illustrating, apparently, 
the Gentle Art of Being Buried Alive : 

And now she dreams she lies in marble rest 

Within the Amieri's chapel-tomb, 
With hands laid idly on an idle breast. 



i66 The Younger American Poets 

How sweetly can the carven lilies bloom, 
As they would soften her untimely doom. . . . 

Nay, living flowers are these that brush her cheek ! 
She starts awake amid the nether gloom, 

From out dead swoon returning faint and weak ; 
No voice hath she, but none might hear her, could she speak. 

Vaguely she reaches from her stony bed ; 

The blessed moonbeam, gliding underground, 
Like angel ministrant from heaven sped, 

To rescue one in frosty irons long bound, 
Cheers her new-beating heart, till she has found 

Recourse of memory and use of will. 
Then soon her feet are on the ladder-round, 

The stone above gives way to patient skill ; 
And now the wide night greets her, bright, and lone, and 
still. 

The story of Genevra, as told by Miss Thomas, 
has often great beauty of phrase, picturesque 
descriptive passages of Florentine life, delicacy 
in the scene between the reunited lovers when 
Genevra seeks Antonio's gate, and fine pathos 
in the lines spoken by her father to her sup- 
posed spirit returning to haunt him ; in short, 
the poem has all but the dramatic touch. The 
narrative force is lost in the poetic elaboration. 
But although Miss Thomas has not the out- 
ward art of the dramatist, she has, as earlier 
stated, a keenly intuitive sense of the spiritually 
dramatic in passing life. Upon love she has 
w T ritten with so keen a psychology that certain 



Edith M. Thomas 167 

of the poems probe to the quick of that source 
of pain ; for it is not the lighter phase, already 
so well celebrated, that she sings, but oftener the 
fateful, the inexplicable. For illustration, the 
poem, " They Said," presents the caprice of love 
by which (they say), it goes to those who hold 
it most lightly, spend it most prodigally, flee it 
to entice it, and yet weave snares to detain it. 
The thrust of these stanzas is as delicately 
keen as a rapier point : 

Because thy prayer hath never fed 
Dark Ate with the food she craves ; 
Because thou dost not hate (they said), 
Nor joy to step on foemen's graves ; 
Because thou canst not hate, as we, 
How poor a creature thou must be, 
Thy veins as pale as ours are red ! 
Go to ! Love loves thee not (they said). 

Because by thee no snare was spread 
To baffle Love — if Love should stray, 
Because thou dost not watch (they said), 
To strictly compass Love each way : 
Because thou dost not watch, as we, 
Nor jealous Care hath lodged with thee, 
To strew with thorns a restless bed — 
Go to ! Love loves thee not (they said). 

Because thy feet were not misled 
To jocund ground, yet all infirm, 
Because thou art not fond (they said), 
Nor dost exact thine heyday term : 



168 The Younger American Poets 

Because thou art not fond, as we, 

How dull a creature thou must be, 

Thy pulse how slow — yet shrewd thy head ! 

Go to ! Love loves thee not (they said). 

Because thou hast not roved to wed 
With those to Love averse or strange, 
Because thou hast not roved (they said), 
Nor ever studied artful change : 
Because thou hast not roved, as we, 
Love paid no ransom rich for thee, 
Nor, seeking thee, unwearied sped. 
Go to ! Love loves thee not (they said). 

Ay, so ! because thou thought'st to tread 
Love's ways, and all his bidding do, 
Because thou hast not tired (they said), 
Nor ever wert to Love untrue : 
Because thou hast not tired, as we, 
How tedious must thy service be ; 
Love with thy zeal is surfeited ! 
Go to ! Love loves thee not (they said). 



Every contradiction of passion is in this poem, 
and the very refinement of satire, as well. 
In " The Domino," Miss Thomas images, with 
a pleasant humor, the various disguises under 
which one meets Love, and svmbolizes in " The 
Barrier" the infallible intuition, the psychic 
sense, by which one feels a change not yet 
apparent. 

" A Home-Thrust," wherein the inconstant 



Edith M. Thomas 169 

one betrays himself by his doubt of another's 
constancy, and "So It Was Decreed," are also 
among the psychological bits of delineation; 
but for the less penetrative but sweeter and 
more memorable note, there are two short 
poems, " Vos Non Vobis," and " The Deep- 
Sea Pearl," tender, human, sufficiently universal 
to appeal to all and artistically wrought. The 
first records that, 

There was a garden planned in Spring's young days, 
Then, Summer held it in her bounteous hand ; 
And many wandered thro' its blooming ways ; 
But ne'er the one for whom the work was planned. 

And it was vainly done — 
For what are many, if we lack the one ? 

There was a song that lived within the heart 
Long time — and then on Music's wing it strayed ; 
All sing it now, all praise its artless art ; 
But ne'er the one for whom the song was made. 

And it was vainly done — 
For what are many, if we lack the one ? 

The whole argument of Art versus Life is 
summed up in this poem. The second lyric, 
of eight lines, is as delicate as the symbol 
it employs, and globes within it, as the drop 
within the pearl, many a life-history: 

The love of my life came not 

As love unto others is cast ; 
For mine was a secret wound — 

But the wound grew a pearl, at last. 



170 The Younger American Poets 

The divers may come and go, 

The tides, they arise and fall ; 
The pearl in its shell lies sealed, 

And the Deep Sea covers all. 

It is in such poems as bring from the heart 
of life a certain poignant strain that Miss 
Thomas is at her best. She .is not a melan- 
choly singer, but her work is too deeply rooted 
in the pain and unrest of life to be joyous. A 
certain longing, an almost impalpable sadness, 
pervades much of her verse. Nevertheless, it 
is not so emphasized as to be depressing, and, 
indeed, adds just the touch of personality by 
which one treasures that which he feels has 
been fused in experience. This pertains to 
the more intimate phases of Miss Thomas' 
work. Upon death she has written with 
deep feeling and insight, — feeling all too 
vital to be analyzed, such as renders Spring 
the season 

When that blithe, forerunning air 
Breathes more hope than thou canst bear. 

Nature is often, in her verse, as it must be to 
any sympathetic mind, a keener source of pain 
than of pleasure, instinct as it is with memories, 
and flaunting before one's thwarted dreams the 
infallible fulfilment of its hopes; yet she has 



Edith M. Thomas 171 

for it an intense passion, and enters into its 
most delicate and undefined moods with swift 
comprehension. 

" The Soul of the Violet," previously referred 
to, is an illustration in point, being a purely- 
subjective treatment of a nature-suggestion. 
When spring is yet too young for promise of 
bloom, and only in the first respite from the 
snow, 

The brown earth raises a wistful face — 
Whenever about the fields I go, 
The soul of the violet haunts me so ! 

I look — there is never a leaf to be seen ; 
In the pleached grass is no thread of green ; 
But I walk as one who would chide his feet 
Lest they trample the hope of something sweet ! 
Here can no flower be blooming, I know — 
Yet the soul of the violet haunts me so ! 

Again and again that thrilling breath, 

Fresh as the life that is snatched out of death, 

Keen as the blow that Love might deal 

Lest a spirit in trance should outward steal — 

So thrilling that breath, so vital that blow — 

The soul of the violet haunts me so ! 

Is it the blossom that slumbers as yet 
Under the leaf-mould dank and wet, 
...... 

Or is it the flower shed long ago ? 
The soul of the violet haunts me so ! 



172 The Younger American Poets 

The subjective touch in the final couplet gives 
the key-note to the poem. 

Miss Thomas is indeed so subjective in her 
conception of some of the profounder and more 
vital losses of life, the sense of the irrevocable 
and irreparable is so keenly emphasized to her 
mind as to communicate almost a hint of fatalism 
to certain of her poems, such as " Expiation " 
and " A Far Cry To Heaven." The latter is 
such an utterance, in its impassioned tone, as 
might proceed from the lips of the Angel with 
the Flaming Sword sent to bar one's return to 
his desecrated Eden. The ultimate effect of 
such a poem, however, is salutary, as the warn- 
ing outruns the scath, and one reading it will 
pay closer heed to the import of the "white 
hour " of his life. On its technical side, the 
poem has all the ease of an improvisation, and 
so at one are the metre and thought that line 
succeeds line with a surge and a rhythm, as 
wave follows wave to the shore: 

What ! dost thou pray that the outgone tide be rolled back 
on the strand, 

The flame be rekindled that mounted away from the smoul- 
dering brand, 

The past-summer harvest flow golden through stubble-lands 
naked and sere. 

The winter-gray woods upgather and quicken the leaves of 
last year ? — 



Edith M. Thomas 173 

Thy prayers are as clouds in a drouth ; regardless, unfruitful, 

they roll ; 
For this, that thou prayest vain things, 't is a far cry to 

Heaven, my soul, — 

Oh, a far cry to Heaven ! 

Thou dreamest the word shall return, shot arrow-like into 

the air, 
The wound in the breast where it lodged be balmed and 

closed for thy prayer, 
The ear of the dead be unsealed, till thou whisper a boon 

once denied, 
The white hour of life be restored, that passed thee unprized, 

undescried ! — 
Thy prayers are as runners that faint, that fail, within sight 

of the goal, 
For this, that thou prayest fond things, 'tis a far cry to 

Heaven, my soul, — 

Oh, a far cry to Heaven ! 

And cravest thou fondly the quivering sands shall be firm to 
thy feet, 

The brackish pool of the waste to thy lips be made whole- 
some and sweet? 

And cravest thou subtly the bane thou desirest, be wrought 
to thy good, 

As forth from a poisonous flower a bee conveyeth safe food ? 

For this, that thou prayest ill things, thy prayers are an 
anger-rent scroll ; 

The chamber of audit is closed, — 't is a far cry to Heaven, 
my soul, — 

Oh, a far cry to Heaven ! 

For the strong, but aloe-tinctured draught of 
this poem, " Sursum Corda " is the antidote. 



174 The Younger American Poets 

Here we have the same experience that went to 
the making of the former poem, and touched it 
with bitterness, turned to sweetness and a fer- 
vor of exaltation, when viewed from the hour 
of illumination at the last. It is throughout a 
valiant, noble song, of which the following 
lines show the spirit : 

Up and rejoice, and know thou hast matter for revel, my 

heart ! 
Up and rejoice, not heeding if drawn or undrawn be the 

dart 
Last winged by the Archer whose quiver is full for sweeter 

than thou, 
That yet will sing out of the dust when the ultimate arrow 

shall bow. 



Now thou couldst bless and God-speed, without bitterness 

bred in thine heart, 
Loves, that, outworn and time-wasted, were fain from thy 

lodge to depart : 
Though dulled by their passing, thy faith, like a flower 

upfolded by night, 
New kindness should quicken again, as a flower feels the 

touch of new light. 
Ay, now thou couldst love, undefeated, with ardor instinct 

from pure Love, — 
Warmed from a sun in the heavens that knows not beneath 

nor above, 
Nor distance its patience to weary, nor substance unpierced 

by its ray. 



Edith M. Thomas 175 

Now couldst thou pity and smile, where once but the scourge 

thou wouldst lay ; 
Now to thyself couldst show mercy, and up from all penance 

arise, 
Knowing there runneth abroad a chastening flame from the 

skies. 

Doubt not thou hast matter for revel, for once thou wouldst 

cage thee in steel, 
And, wounded, wouldst seek out the balm and the cordial 

cunning to heal ; 
But now thou hast knowledge more sovran, more kind, than 

leech-craft can wield : 
Never Design sent thee forth to be safe from the scath of 

the field, 
But bade thee stand bare in the midst, and offer free way to 

all scath 
Piercing thee inly — so only might Song have an outgoing 

path. 

But now ? t is not thine to bestow, to abide, or be known in 

thy place; 
Withdraweth the voice into silence, dissolveth the form and 

the face. 
Death — Life thou discernest ! Enlarged as thou art, thy 

ground thou must shift ! 
Love over-liveth. Throb thou forth quickly. Heart, be 

uplift! 

The hard-won philosophy of nearly all lives 
is summed up in these stanzas, pregnant there- 
fore with suggestion to those who have the un- 
trodden way before them, and full of uplift to 
those who have the course behind them, and 



176 The Younger American Poets 

view it in retrospect as but " a stuff to try the 
soul's strength on." 

Not only in this poem, but throughout her 
work, the evolution of Miss Thomas' philoso- 
phy of life is marked, had one time to trace 
its growing significance. She has sounded 
many stops, touched many keys of feeling and 
thought, so that one may do no more in a brief 
comment than suggest the various phases of 
her widely inclusive song. 



IX 

MADISON CAWEIN 

IN nothing, more than in his attitude toward 
nature, does the modern betray himself. 
Ours is the questioning age, the truth- 
seeking, the scientific age; when, for illustra- 
tion, Maeterlinck laid his philosophy by to 
observe with infinite pains the habits of the 
bee and to record, without the intrusion of too 
many deductions, the amazing facts as nature 
passed them in review before his eyes, — he 
became the naturalist-philosopher, selling days, 
not for speculations, but for laws. To the 
poet also has come the desire which came to 
the philosopher to demonstrate the truth with- 
in the beauty; to penetrate to the finer law at 
the heart of things; in short, there has arisen 
what one may term the poet-naturalist, and in 
the recent work of Mr. Madison Cawein we 
have perhaps the most characteristic illustra- 
tion among our own poets of the younger 
school, of this phase of nature-interpretation. 

Before considering it, however, one must 
trace briefly Mr. Cawein's evolutionary steps 

12 



178 The Younger American Poets 

through the haunted ways of nature in its 
imaginative and romantic phases, which en- 
thralled him first, by no means wholly, but 
predominantly, and of which he has left many 
records in his volume, Myth and Romance. 
Of the more artistic poems, worthy to be put 
in comparison with his later work, there are 
several from the opening group of the collec- 
tion, as these picturesque lines containing the 
query : 

What wood-god, on this water's mossy curb, 

Lost in reflection of earth's loveliness, 
Did I, just now, unconsciously disturb? 

I, who haphazard, wandering at a guess, 
Came on this spot, wherein, with gold and flame 
Of buds and blooms, the season writes its name. — 
Ah me ! could I have seen him ere alarm 
Of my approach aroused him from his calm ! 
As he, part Hamadryad and, mayhap, 
Part Faun, lay here ; who left the shadow warm 
As wild-wood rose, and filled the air with balm 
Of his sweet breath as with ethereal sap. 

Or from the same group these charming 
glimpses of " an unseen presence that 

eludes " : — 

Perhaps a Dryad, in whose tresses cling 

The loamy odors of old solitudes, 
Who, from her beechen doorway, calls ; 



Madison Cawein 179 

Or, haply 't is a Naiad now who slips, 

Like some white lily, from her fountain's glass, 

While from her dripping hair and breasts and hips, 
The moisture rains cool music on the grass. 



Or now it is an Oread — whose eyes 

Are constellated dusk — who stands confessed, 

As naked as a flow'r ; her heart's surprise, 

Like morning's rose, mantling her brow and breast : 
She, shrinking from my presence, all distressed 

Stands for a startled moment ere she flies, 

Her deep hair blowing, up the mountain crest, 

Wild as a mist that trails along the dawn. 
And is 't her footfalls lure me ? or the sound 
Of airs that stir the crisp leaf on the ground? 

And is 't her body glimmers on yon rise ? 

Or dog-wood blossoms snowing on the lawn ? 

Who shall deny both charm and accomplish- 
ment to these lines, particularly to the glimpse 
of the dryad in her " beechen doorway," but 
on the next page of the same volume occurs 
this more realistic apostrophe addressed to the 
" Rain-Crow," giving a foretokening hint of his 
later manner of observation, and who shall say 
that it has not a truer charm and accomplish- 
ment ? 

Can freckled August, — drowsing warm and blonde 
Beside a wheat-shock in the white-topped mead, 

In her hot hair the oxeyed daisies wound, — 
O bird of rain, lend aught but sleepy heed 



i8o The Younger American Poets 

To thee ? when no plumed weed, no feather'd seed 
Blows by her; and no ripple breaks the pond, 
That gleams like flint between its rim of grasses, 
Through which the dragonfly forever passes 
Like splintered diamond. 

Drouth weights the trees, and from the farmhouse eaves 

The locust, pulse-beat of the summer day, 
Throbs ; and the lane, that shambles under leaves 

Limp with the heat — a league of rutty way — 

Is lost in dust ; and sultry scents of hay 
Breathe from the panting meadows heaped with sheaves — 

Now, now, O bird, what hint is there of rain, 

In thirsty heaven or on burning plain, 
That thy keen eye perceives ? 

But thou art right. Thou prophesiest true. 
For hardly hast thou ceased thy forecasting, 

When, up the western fierceness of scorched blue, 
Great water-carrier winds their buckets bring 
Brimming with freshness. How their dippers ring 

And flash and rumble ! lavishing dark dew 
On corn and forestland, that, streaming wet, 
Their hilly backs against the downpour set, 
Like giants vague in view. 

The butterfly, safe under leaf and flower, 

Has found a roof, knowing how true thou art ; 

The bumble-bee, within the last half-hour, 
Has ceased to hug the honey to its heart ; 
While in the barnyard, under shed and cart, 

Brood-hens have housed. — But I, who scorned thy power, 
Barometer of the birds, — like August there, — 
Beneath a beech, dripping from foot to hair, 
Like some drenched truant, cower. 



Madison Cawein 181 

This, however, is airy imagination as compared 
with the naturalist fidelity of much of Mr. 
Cawein's work in Weeds by the Wall, A Voice 
on the Wind, and in Kentucky Poems, — to 
which Mr. Edmund Gosse contributes a 
sympathetic introduction, — books chiefly 
upon nature, occasionally reverting to the 
mythological or more imaginative phase of 
the subject, but in the main set to reveal the 
fact, with its aura of beauty ; for it is never the 
purely elemental side of a nature-manifestation 
that presents itself to Mr. Cawein, but always 
the fact haloed by its poetic penumbra. Indeed, 
the limitation of his earlier work lay in the 
excess of fancy over reflection and art; but 
his growth has been away from the romantic 
toward the realistic and individual, and upon this 
side its best assurance for the future is given. 
Mr. Cawein has yet far too facile a pen not to 
be betrayed by it into excesses both of produc- 
tion and fancy. He writes too much to keep to 
the standard set in his best work of the past two 
or three years, and lacks still to a great degree 
the self-scrutiny which would reject much that 
he includes; but granting all this, it must be 
apparent to any reader of his work that he is 
not a singer making verse for diversion, but 
one to whom poetry is the very breath of his 



1 82 The Younger American Poets 

spirit, one who lives by this air, and can by no 
other; and while it is one thing to be driven 
through vision-haunted days by beauty's ur- 
gence and unrest, and another to body forth 
the vision in the calm ; one thing to have had 
the mystery whispered by a thousand wordless 
voices, and another to communicate it in terms of 
revealing truth — it is notable in Mr. Cawein's 
verse that he is teaching his hand to obey him 
more surely each year, and is producing work 
that quickens one's perception of the world 
without, and adds to his sum of beauty. It is 
serious work, work with purpose, and while its 
fancy still runs at times to the fantastic, it 
shows so marked a growth in technique and 
spirit from year to year that one may well let 
to-morrow take care of to-morrow with a poet 
who brings to his art the ideal which inspires 
Mr. Cawein. 

To return, then, to his distinctive field, Ken- 
tucky, and his characteristic note of nature, one 
observes that a hand-book of the flora of his 
state could doubtless be compiled from his 
poems, so do they leave the beaten path in their 
range of observation ; but it would be a botany 
plus imagination and sympathy, analysts keener 
than microscopes, and in it would be recorded 
the habits of the bluet, the jewel-weed, the 



Madison Cawein 183 

celandine, the black-cohosh, the bell-flower, the 
lobelia, the elecampane, the oxalis, the touch- 
me-not, the Indian-pipe, and many another 
unused to hear its name rehearsed in song. 

One follows the feet of September to the 
forest 

Windowed wide with azure, doored with green, 
Through which rich glimmers of her robe were seen — 
Now, like some deep marsh-mallow, rosy gold ; 
Now like the great Joe-Pye-weed, fold on fold 
Of heavy mauve ; and now, like the intense 
Massed iron-weed, a purple opulence ; 

or wanders under the Hunter's Moon to watch 
the frost spirits 

. . . with fine fingers, phantom-cold, 
Splitting the wahoo's pods of rose, and thin 
The bittersweet' s balls o' gold 

To show the coal-red berries packed within. 

Autumn is apparently, however, little to his 
liking, and in his attitude toward it he reveals 
the Southerner; for it is not only Kentucky 
flora and fauna, but Kentucky climate which 
Mr. Cawein celebrates, treating Autumn not 
with the buoyancy that to a Northerner renders 
it a season of lusty infection, but almost wholly 
in its aspect of sadness. In his volume called 
Undertones he has a group of poems upon 



1 84 The Younger American Poets 

the withdrawing year, sounding only this note, 
which is the prevalent one when touching 
upon the same theme in his other volumes. 
He glimpses 

... the Fall 
Like some lone woman in a ruined hall 

Dreaming of desolation and the shroud ; 

Or through decaying woodlands goes, down-bowed, 
Hugging the tatters of her gipsy shawl ; 

and speaks elsewhere of 

... the days gray-huddled in the haze ; 
Whose foggy footsteps drip. 

Winter is encountered with far scantier cheer, 
and rarely receives the grace of salutation, as 
its face appears dire and malevolent to this 
lover of the sun. To follow Mr. Cawein's work 
with such a purpose in view would be to present 
an interesting study in climatic psychology, for 
though no mention were made of the section 
in which he writes, the internal evidence is 
sufficient to localize the poems. Not alone 
the gracious side of the Southern summer is 
presented, but the fearful time of drouth when 

The hot sunflowers by the glaring pike 

Lift shields of sultry brass ; the teasel tops, 

Pink-thorned, advance with bristling spike on spike 
Against the furious sunlight. Field and copse 
Are sick with summer : now ; with breathless stops. 



Madison Cawein 185 

The locusts cymbal ; now grasshoppers beat 

Their castanets : and rolled in dust, a team, — 
Like some mean life wrapped in its sorry dream, — 

An empty wagon rattles through the heat. 

This is vivid picturing and a fine touch of 
realism fused with imagination which compares 
the team rolled in dust to 

" Some mean life wrapped in its sorry dream." 

Immediately following the poem upon " Drouth," 
of which there are several stanzas sketched with 
minuteness, occurs one entitled " Before the 
Rain," opening with these pictorial lines : 

Before the rain, low in the obscure east, 

Weak and morose the moon hung, sickly gray ; 

Around its disc the storm mists, cracked and creased, 
Wove an enormous web, wherein it lay 
Like some white spider hungry for its prey. 

Vindictive looked the scowling firmament, 
In which each star, that flashed a dagger ray, 

Seemed filled with malice of some dark intent. 

The moon caught in its creased web of storm 
mists is another well-visioned image. Mr. 
Cawein carries the record on to a third poem, 
picturing the " Broken Drouth ; " all are not- 
able for the infusion of atmosphere, — climatic 
atmosphere, in this case; and indeed of this 
palpable sort there is plenty, infused into words 
that fairly parch the page in such poems as 



186 The Younger American Poets 

" Heat," or " To the Locust," which give 
abundant evidence that Mr. Cawein knows 
whereof he speaks and is not supposing a 
case. The stanzas to " The Grasshopper " 
will deepen this conviction when one looks 
them up in the volume called Weeds by the 
Wall. 

Mr. Cawein has poems in celebration of 
many other of the creatures whom he links 
in fellowship with man in his keenly obser- 
vant verse. " The Twilight Moth," " The 
Leaf Cricket," " The Tree Toad," " The Chip- 
munk," and even the despised " Screech-Owl," 
are observed and celebrated with impartial sym- 
pathy and love. He shelters in the wood dur- 
ing a summer rain to learn where each tiny 
fellow of the earth and air bestows himself, 
and notes that the " lichen-colored moths " 
are pressed " like knots against the trunks of 
trees ; " that the bees are wedged like " clots 
of pollen " in hollow blooms, and that the 
" mantis, long-clawed, furtive, lean," and the 
dragonfly are housed together beneath the wild- 
grape's leaves and gourds. Each creature's 
haunt, 'neath rock or root, or frail roof-bloom, 
is determined as a naturalist might lie in wait 
during the summer storm to record for Sci- 
ence's sake each detail of this forest tenantry. 



Madison Cawein 187 

Imagination has, however, touched it to beauty, 
while losing none of the fidelity. 

To the "Twilight Moth," "gnome wrought 
of moonbeam fluff and gossamer," he addresses 
in another poem these delicate lines : 

Dusk is thy dawn ; when Eve puts on her state 
Of gold and purple in the marbled west, 

Thou comest forth like some embodied trait, 
Or dim conceit, a lily-bud confessed ; 

Or, of a rose, the visible wish ; that, white, 

Goes softly messengering through the night, 
Whom each expectant flower makes its guest. 

All day the primroses have thought of thee, 

Their golden heads close-haremed from the heat ; 

All day the mystic moonflowers silkenly 

Veiled snowy faces, — that no bee might greet 

Or butterfly that, weighed with pollen, passed ; — 

Keeping Sultana charms for thee, at last, 
Their lord, who comest to salute each sweet. 

Cool-throated flowers that avoid the day's 
Too fervid kisses ; every bud that drinks 

The tipsy dew and to the starlight plays 

Nocturnes of fragrance, thy winged shadow links 

In bonds of secret brotherhood and faith ; 

O bearer of their order's shibboleth, 

Like some pale symbol fluttering o'er these pinks. 

The final line of this stanza has a certain thin- 
ness, and in that above, the ending which turns 
" sweet " to a noun is too evidently a matter 



1 88 The Younger American Poets 

of expediency; but with these exceptions the 
stanzas are charming, as are the unquoted 
ones following them. Before turning to other 
phases of Mr. Cawein's work, here is a glimpse 
of the " Tree Toad," pictured with quaint deli- 
cacy and fancy : 

Secluded, solitary on some underbough, 

Or cradled in a leaf, 'mid glimmering light. 

Like Puck thou crouchest : haply watching how 
The slow toad stool comes bulging, moony white, 
Through loosening loam ; or how, against the night, 

The glow-worm gathers silver to endow 

The darkness with ; or how the dew conspires 
To hang at dusk with lamps of chilly fires 
Each blade that shrivels now. 



Minstrel of moisture ! silent when high noon 

Shows her tanned face among the thirsting clover 

And parching meadows, thy tenebrious tune 
Wakes with the dew or when the rain is over. 
Thou troubadour of wetness and damp lover 

Of all cool things ! admitted comrade boon 
Of twilight's hush, and little intimate 
Of eve's first fluttering star and delicate 
Round rim of rainy moon ! 

Art trumpeter of Dwarfland ? does thy horn 
Inform the gnomes and goblins of the hour 

When they may gambol under haw and thorn, 

Straddling each winking web and twinkling flower? 
Or bell-ringer of Elfland? whose tall tower 



Madison Cawein 189 

The liriodendron is? from whence is borne 
The elfin music of thy bell's deep bass 
To summon fairies to their starlit maze, 
To summon them or warn. 

What a happy bit of realism is that of the toad- 
stool " bulging, moony white, through loosen- 
ing loam " ! The second of the stanzas may 
be too Keats-like in atmosphere to have been 
achieved with unconsciousness of the fact, be 
that as it may, it is a bit of sheer beauty, as the 
last is of dainty fancy. 

But nature, either realistically or romanti- 
cally, is not all that Mr. Cawein writes of, 
though it must be said that his verse upon 
other themes is so largely tinctured with his 
nature passion that one rarely comes upon a 
poem whose illustrations are not drawn more 
or less from this source, making it difficult to 
find lyrics wholly upon other themes. Because 
of his opulent metrical variety, Mr. Cawein is 
less lyrical than as if he sang in simpler mea- 
sures. His lyrics, indeed, are in the main his 
least distinguished work, having frequently, if 
highly musical, too slight a motive ; or if more 
consequent in motive, not being sufficiently 
musical ; or the melody may be unimpeach- 
able and the theme too romantic to have con- 
vincing value, as " Mignon," " Helen," " The 



190 The Younger American Poets 

Quest," " Floridian," etc. Indeed, Mr. Cawein 
sounds the troubadour note all too frequently in 
his lyrical love poems, which are not without 
a lightsome grace of phrase and fancy, as be- 
comes this style of verse ; but it is likely to 
be a superficial note, heard but to be forgot- 
ten. He can, however, strike a deeper chord, 
as in the poem called " The End of All," or in 
that from an earlier volume, bringing a poig- 
nant undertone in its strong, calm utterance, 
beginning 

Go your own ways. Who shall persuade me now 
To seek with high face for a star of hope ? 

and ending, 

Though sands be black and bitter black the sea, 
Night lie before me and behind me night, 
And God within far Heaven refuse to light 

The consolation of the dawn for me, — 

Between the shadowy bourns of Heaven and Hell, 
It is enough love leaves my soul to dwell 
With memory. 

In such notes as these controlled by the Vox 
Humana stop, Mr. Cawein best reveals himself; 
another, coming from the heart rather than the 
fancy, is " Nightshade," from the volume called 
Intimations of the Beautiful, a record of life's 
bringing to judgment the late-proffered love, 
unyielded when desired. 



Madison Cawein 191 

" A Wild Iris " is in the later and finer man- 
ner, but although love is the spirit of the song, 
it is embodied chiefly in terms of nature, and 
would not reveal a different phase of his work 
from that already shown. This, too, is the case 
with the two lighter lyrics, " Love In A Day " 
and " In The Lane," each with a most taking 
measure; the second a rural song lilting into 
this note: 

When the hornet hangs in the hollyhock, 
And the brown bee drones i ? the rose, 

And the west is a red-streaked four-o'-clock, 
And summer is near its close — 

It 's — Oh, for the gate and the locust lane 

And dusk and dew and home again ! 

Mr. Cawein has frequent poems in celebra- 
tion of the farm, not only its picturesque cheer, 
but its dignity and finer idealism. "A Song 
For Labor " is one of the best ; also " Old 
Homes," an idyllic picture of the Southern 
plantation, with its gentle haze of reminis- 
cence: 

Old homes among the hills ! I love their gardens, 
Their old rock-fences, that our day inherits ; 

Their doors, 'round which the great trees stand like 
wardens ; 
Their paths, down which the shadows march like spirits ; 

Broad doors and paths that reach bird-haunted gardens. 



192 The Younger American Poets 

I see them gray among their ancient acres, 

Severe of front, their gables lichen-sprinkled, — 

Like gentle-hearted, solitary Quakers, 

Grave and religious, with kind faces wrinkled, — 

Serene among their memory-hallowed acres. 



Their gardens, banked with roses and with lilies — 
Those sweet aristocrats of all the flowers — 

Where Springtime mints her gold in daffodillies, 
And Autumn coins her marigolds in showers, 

And all the hours are toilless as the lilies. 



Old homes ! old hearts ! Upon my soul forever 

Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter ; 

Like love they touch me, through the years that sever, 
With simple faith ; like friendship, draw me after 

The dreamy patience that is theirs forever. 

Mr. Cawein blends the mood and the pic- 
ture in the simple tenderness of these lines, 
with their unstriving felicity. Kentucky's more 
strenuous side also finds a chronicler in his 
verse : the tragedies of its mountains are told 
in one of the earlier volumes in such poems as 
"The Moonshiner," "The Raid," and "Dead 
Man's Run ; " and in Weeds by the Wall, in 
that graphic poem " Feud," sketching with the 
pencil of a realist the road to the spot 

. . . where all the land 
Seems burdened with some curse, 



Madison Cawein 193 

and where, sunk in obliterative growth of 
briers, burrs, and ragweed, stands the 

. . . huddled house . 
Where men have murdered men, 

and where a terrified silence still broods, for 

The place seems thinking of that time of fear 
And dares not breathe a sound. 

Mr. Howells, in an appreciation of Mr. Cawein's 
work, after the appearance of Weeds by the 
Wall, spoke of this poem declaring that " What 
makes one think he will go far and long, and 
outlive both praise and blame, is the blending 
of a sense of the Kentucky civilization in such 
a poem as ' Feud.' Civilization may not be 
quite the word for the condition of things sug- 
gested here, but there can be no doubt of the 
dramatic and the graphic power that suggests 
it, and that imparts a personal sense of the 
tragic squalor, the sultry drouth, the forlorn 
wickedness of it all." His poem " Ku Klux," 
in a volume published some time ago, is no 
less dramatic in touch and theme. Mr. Cawein 
knows how to set his picture ; the ominous 
portent of the night in which the dark deed 
is done would be understood from these three 
lines alone: 

13 



194 The Younger American Poets 

The clouds blow heavy towards the moon. 
The edge of the storm will reach it soon. 
The kildee cries and the lonesome loon. 

It may be said of Mr. Cawein's work in 
general that it shows him to be alert to im- 
pression, and gives abundant evidence that life 
presents itself to him abrim with suggestion. 
Occasionally, as mentioned above, he wanders 
too far into the romantic, or yields to the 
rhyming impulse in a fallow time of thought; 
but when he throws this facile poetizing by, 
and betakes himself to nature and life in the 
capacity of observer and analyst, he produces 
work notable for its strength, fidelity, and 
beauty. Metrically, in his earlier work he was 
influenced by various poets he had read too 
well. " Intimations of the Beautiful," occupy- 
ing a part of the volume bearing that name, 
would be one of his best efforts, in thought 
and imaginative charm, were it not written 
in a form developed from " In Memoriam," 
so that one is haunted by the metrical echo. 
The poem is devoted to interpretations of 
life and the spirit, through nature; and has 
not a division without some revelation from 
that book of the earth which Mr. Cawein 
has made his gospel. Its observations, while 
couched in imagery that now and again tends 



Madison Cawein 195 

to the over-fanciful, are in the main consistent 
and artistic. 

In his recent books, however, he adventures 
upon his way, seeing wholly by the light of 
his own eyes, and portraying by the skill of his 
own hand, so that his work has taken on per- 
sonality and individuality with each succeeding 
volume. 

Its breath from the bourns of meadow and 
woodland brings with it a stimulating fra- 
grance, and one closes a book by Mr. Cawein, 
feeling that he has been in some charmed spot 
under Southern skies where 

Of honey and heat and weed and wheat 
The day had made perfume. 



X 

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 

" For he who standeth in the whole world's hope 
Is as a magnet ; he shall draw all hearts 
To be his shield, all arms to strike his blow." 



I 



"^HESE words by Mr. George E. Wood- 
berry sound the keynote to his art, 
for he has set himself to disclose the 
immanence of beauty, of strength ; to mould 
the real to the ideal ; and whether he fashions 
a god, as in " Agathon," or a patriot, as in 
" My Country," he is concerned only with the 
development of the spiritual potentialities. 

He comes to life, to poetry, enriched by a 
scholar's culture, but limited by his enrichment 
on the creative side of his art. He is too 
well possessed of the immortal melodies to 
trust the spontaneous notes of his own voice, 
and hence his verse on its technical side lacks 
variety and freedom of movement. It has all 
the cultivated, classical freedom, it flows ever 
in pure and true numbers ; but the masters 
sing in its overtones, and one catches himself 
hearkening to them as to Mr. Woodberry him- 



George E. Woodberry 197 

self. In other words, those innovations of 
form which strongly creative thoughts usually 
bring with them, are not to be found in Mr. 
Woodberry's work. He has a highly devel- 
oped sense of rhythm and tone, and very rarely 
is any metrical canon violated ; but the strange 
new music, the wild free note, that showers 
down as if from upper air, and sets one's heart 
a-tingling, is seldom voiced through him. The 
bird is caged ; and while its song is true and 
beautiful, one comes soon to know its notes 
and the range of its melody. 

Mr. Woodberry has, however, something to 
say; and if he says it rather with grace and 
cultivation as to form, than with any startling 
surprises of artistic effect, his work in its es- 
sence, in its spirit, is none the less creative, 
and upon this side its strength lies. It is 
ethical and intellectual, rather than emotional, 
poetry. Though rising often to an impas- 
sioned height, it is a passion of the brain, 
pure and cold as a flood of moonlight. Even 
the songs of " Wild Eden," and others dealing 
with love, remain an abstraction ; one does 
not get the sense of personality, except in one 
or two of them, such as the lyric, " O, Inex- 
pressible As Sweet," and in these few lines 
called " Divine Awe " : 



198 The Younger American Poets 

To tremble when I touch her hands, 
With awe that no man understands ; 
To feel soft reverence arise 
When, lover-sweet, I meet her eyes ; 
To see her beauty grow and shine 
When most I feel this awe divine, — 
Whate'er befall me, this is mine ; 
And where about the room she moves, 
My spirit follows her, and loves. 

But although one misses the sense of reality 
in the songs of love, the ideality is for that 
reason the more apparent. Love that has 
sublimated, taken on the rarer part, that 
has made a mystic interchange with nature 
and with God, is celebrated in the fervid poem, 
"He Ate The Laurel And Is Mad," which 
marks one of the strongest achievements in 
Mr. Woodberry's work, and especially in a 
lyric it contains, vibrating with a fine, com- 
pulsive melody. The lines preceding the lyric 
relate the coming of Love into the heart of 
nature : 

And instant back his longing runs 

Through bud and billow, through drift and blaze, 

Through thought, through prayer, the thousand ways 

The spirit journeys from despair; 

He sees all things that they are fair, 

But feels them as the daisied sod, — 

This slumbrous beauty, this light, this room, 

The chrysalis and broken tomb 

He cleaveth on his way to God. 



George E. Woodberry 199 

Then the poem breaks into this paean, whose 
music outsings its thought when pushed to 
analysis ; this is one of Mr. Woodberry 's metri- 
cal exceptions that prove the rule. Here is 
sheer music making fine but not extraordinary 
thought seem great, whereas in the majority of 
his work it is the thought to which one listens 
rather than the melody ; but to the lyric, 

I shall go singing over-seas ; 

" The million years of the planets increase; 

All pangs of death, all cries of birth, 

Are clasped at one by the heart of the earth." 

I shall go singing by tower and town : 
" The thousand cities of men that crown 
Empire slow-rising from horde and clan, 
Are clasped at one by the heart of man." 

I shall go singing by flower and brier : 
" The multitudinous stars of fire, 
And man made infinite under the sod, 
Are clasped at one by the heart of God." 

I shall go singing by ice and snow : 

u Blow soon, dread angel, greatly blow, 

Break up, ye gulfs, beneath, above, 

Peal, time's last music, — * love, love, love ! ' " 

Of his recent volume in which he gathers his 
most representative work, " The North Shore 
Watch," a threnody published some years ago, 



200 The Younger American Poets 

remains one of the truest poems in sincerity and 
sympathy of expression, — not only an idyl of 
remembered comradeship, but of the sea in its 
many moods; and here one may note that of 
Mr. Woodberry's references to nature, those of 
the sea are incomparably the finest, and exhale 
an invigorating savor of the brine. They are 
scattered through " The North Shore Watch," 
but because of the stately sadness of the verse 
are less representative of his characteristic note 
than are these buoyant lines which open the 
poem " Seaward ": 

I will go down in my youth to the hoar sea's infinite 

foam; 
I will bathe in the winds of heaven ; I will nest where the 

white birds home ; 
Where the sheeted emerald glitters and drifts with bursts of 

snow, 
In the spume of stormy mornings, I will make me ready 

and go ; 
Where under the clear west weather the violet surge is 

rolled, 
I will strike with the sun in heaven the day-long league of 

gold; 
Will mix with the waves, and mingle with the bloom of the 

sunset bar, 
And toss with the tangle of moonbeams, and call to the 

morning star; 
And wave and wing shall know me a seachild even as 

they, 
Of the race of the great seafarers, a thousand years if a day. 



George E. Woodberry 201 

These lines have the bracing ozone of the 
east wind ; it is good to fill one's lungs with 
their freshening breath. In another sea-song, 
" Homeward Bound," an exultant, grateful 
hymn, Mr. Woodberry speaks of steering 

" Through the weird, red-billowing sunset " 

and of falling asleep in the " rocking dark," 
and with the dawn, 

Whether the purple furrow heaps the bows with dazzling 

spray, 
Or buried in green-based masses they dip the storm-swept 

day, 
Or the white fog ribbons o'er them, the strong ship holds 

her way. 

These are pictures in strong color, freehand 
records with pigment, of which Mr. Wood- 
berry's sea-verse contains many duplicates. He 
paints the sea as an impressionist, catching her 
evanescent moods. Aside from the pictorial 
art of the poem from which the lines above 
are taken, it thrills with the gladness that 
abides with one coming 

Home from the lonely cities, time's wreck, and the naked 

woe, 
Home through the clean great waters where freemen's 

pennants blow, 
Home to the land men dream of, where all the nations go. 



202 The Younger American Poets 

Mr. Woodberry is an American, and ever an 
American, whatever tribute he may pay at 
longer dedicated shrines. His ode to " My 
Country" is an impassioned utterance, full of 
ideality, and pride in things as they are, not 
lacking, however, in the prophetic vision of 
what they shall be. He trusts his country 
without reservation, recognizes her greater 
commission in w T hat has terrified many poets, — 
the absorption of the Eastern isles, — and bids 
her be swift to yield her benefits : 

O, whisper to thy clustered isles 

If any rosy promise round them smiles ; 

O, call to every seaward promontory 

If one of them, perchance, is made the cape of glory. 

In technique the ode has a fine sweep and 
movement; it thrills with flights of feeling, as 
in these lines near the close, — 

And never greater love salutes thy brow 
Than his, who seeks thee now. 
Alien the sea and salt the foam 
Where'er it bears him from his home ; 
And when he leaps to land, 
A lover treads the strand. 

The ode is somewhat marred by prolixity, 
and now and again by the declamatory impulse 
getting the better of the creative ; but granting 



George E. Woodberry 203 

this it remains a fine rhapsody, redeeming the 
time to those who think the days are evil, and 
more than ever proving Mr. Woodberry the 
idealist, if not, indeed, the prophet. In the 
Emerson Ode, read at the centenary in Boston, 
there is poem-for-occasion utterance until one 
reaches the fourth division, where the rhetoric 
gives way to the pensive note, 

I lay the singing laurels down 
Upon the silent grave, 

and grows from this into a glimpsing of Em- 
erson's most characteristic thought, to which 
Mr. Woodberry sings his own indebtedness. 
This philosophical resume has value as critical 
interpretation and as tribute to whom tribute 
is due, but it lacks the vital spark as poetry. 
Odes of this sort are no gauge of a poet's merit, 
and although Mr. Woodberry does not reveal 
his weakness in writing of this sort, neither 
does he to any marked degree reveal his 
strength. It is work of conventional credita- 
bility, reaching occasionally some flight of pure 
poetry, but pervaded in general by the per- 
functory note that results from coercing the 
muse ; and here one may interpolate the wish 
that all poems-for-occasion might be "put 
upon the list," for it is certain, not only that 



204 The Younger American Poets 

the majority of them " never would be missed," 
but that poetry would rebound from a most 
inert weight if lightened of them ; nor is this 
in any sense personal to Mr. Woodberry, whose 
" Emerson Ode " is a far stronger piece of work 
than are most compositions of a similar nature. 
In the " Player's Elegy," in the ode written for 
the dedication of Alumni Hall at Phillips Exeter 
Academy, and in the several poems addressed 
to his fellow-professors at Columbia, there are 
also passages of spontaneous force and beauty, 
and the high motive of all must not be lost 
sight of, but, taken as a whole, this group of 
poems could scarcely figure in an appraisal of 
the individuality of his work. 

It is on the spiritually philosophical side of 
his nature that Mr. Woodberry makes his 
strongest appeal. He is not primarily a poet of 
love, nor of nature, nor a melodist making 
music for its own sake; he is an eager, questing 
follower of the ideal; proclaimer of the truth 
that 

The glamour of God hath a thousand shapes 
And every one divine. 

When he interprets the mystery of love, or 
turns to the world without, it is the imma- 
nence of the divine that haunts him : 



George E. Woodberry 205 

Over the grey leagues of ocean 

The infinite yearneth alone ; 
The forests with wandering emotion 

The thing they know not intone. 

He is, indeed, the spirit's votary, and the ulti- 
mate purport of his message is the recognition 
of one's own spirit force. His poem, " Nay, 
Soul," rebukes the weakness that looks on 
every side for that w T hich is within ; the nature 
that, seeking props, falls by the way ; or, crav- 
ing understanding, loses the strength that comes 
of being misunderstood. It subtly divides the 
legitimate gifts of sympathy from those which 
weakness demands, and reveals the impossi- 
bility of coercing life, or love, or any good to 
which one's nature is not so magnetized that it 
comes to him unentreated. These are potent 
lines : — 

Nay, Soul, thy shame forbear ! 
Between the earth and sky 
Was never man could buy 
The bread of life with prayer, 
Not though his brother there 
Saw him with hunger die. 

His life a man may give, 
But, not for deepest ruth, 
Beauty, nor love, nor truth 
Whereby himself doth live. 
Come home, poor fugitive ! 
Art thou so poor, forsooth? 



206 The Younger American Poets 

Thy heart — look thou aright ! 
Fear not the wild untrod, 
Nor birth, nor burial sod ! 
Look, and in native light, 
Bare as to Christ's own sight, 
Living shalt thou see God. 

The dramatic poem, " Agathon," which is 
builded upon the philosophy of Plato, is per- 
haps the most thoughtful and thought-inciting 
work in the newly collected volume. It is in 
no sense of the word dramatic, but doubtless 
cast in this form from its wider adaptability to 
the contrasts of thought. The poem is too 
lengthy to follow an analysis of its philosophy, 
which is wrought out with subtle elaboration, 
smacking too much at times of a logical dem- 
onstration, but in the main leavened with im- 
aginative phrase. Its poetic climax is in the 
apostrophe which follows the statement that 

The sweetest roamer is a boy's young heart. 

The lines form a blank-verse lyric with a rich 
cadence and movement: 

O youngest Roamer, Hesper shuts the day, 
White Hesper folded in the rose of eve ; 
The still cloud floats, and kissed by twilight sleeps ; 
The mists drop down, and near the mountain moor ; 
And mute the bird's throat swells with slumber now ; 
And now the wild winds to their eyries cling. 



George E. Woodberry 207 

O youngest Roaraer, wonderful is joy, 

The rose in bloom that out of darkness springs ; 

The lily folded to the wave of life, 

The lotus on the stream's dark passion borne. 

Ah fortunate he roams who roameth here, 
Who finds the happy covert and lies down, 
And hears the laughter gurgling in the fount, 
And feels the dreamy light imbathe his limbs. 
No more he roams, he roams no more, no more. 

These lines are reminiscent of Tennyson's 
" Princess " in their metrical note, particularly 
in the final couplet of the first stanza, with the 
11 dying fall " of the cadence, bringing to mind : 

Now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost, 
And like a ghost she glimmers on to me. 

Mr. Woodberry's poetic affiliation with 
Tennyson comes out unmistakably in various 
other poems, leaving no doubt as to one of the 
masters who sing in his over-tones. Here, for 
illustration, is a transfusion with Tennyson's 
" Tears, Idle Tears." One stanza of the flaw- 
less lyric reads: 

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns 

The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds 

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes 

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square ; 

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more. 

And Mr. Woodberry says : 



208 The Younger American Poets 

O hidden-strange as on dew-heavy lawns 

The warm dark scent of summer-fragrant dawns ; 

O tender as the faint sea-changes are, 

When grows the flush and pales the snow-white star ; 

So strange, so tender, to a maid is love. 

The mere fact of employing the Tennyson 
metre, especially when rhymed, would not give 
the sense of over-assimilation of the other's 
work were it not for the marked correspond- 
ence in the diction and atmosphere, the first 
line of Tennyson's lyric being expanded into 
the opening couplet of Mr. Woodberry's stanza, 
and the final lines of each having so similar 
a terminology. Shelley is a much more oper- 
ative force in Mr. Woodberry's poetry than 
Tennyson, but rather in temperamental kin- 
ship than in a technical way. Mr. Woodberry 
could scarcely fail to have a keen sympathy 
with the passionate art of Shelley, who lived 
in the ideal, subtilized and sublimated beyond 
all reach but that of longing, but who yet set 
his hand and brain to the strife about him. In 
his earlier work Mr. Woodberry occasionally 
shows the Shelley influence in technique and 
theme, but not in his later verse. One can 
scarcely understand his leaving in a definitive 
collection of his work the poem " Love at the 
Door," whose obligations to Taylor's " Bedouin 



George E. Woodberry 209 

Love Song " and Shelley's " I arise from dreams 
of thee," are about equally distributed. Most 
poets have their early experiments in the re- 
shaping of forms and themes, but they should 
be edited out of representative collections. The 
poem is scarcely a creditable assimilation of 
the models in question, and does scant justice 
to Mr. Woodberry's later poetry, making the 
query more inevitable why he should have left 
it in the volume, which is in the main so 
finished and ripe a work. Occasionally one 
comes upon poems, or passages, which a keener 
self-criticism would have eliminated, as the line 
from " Taormina," declaring that 

Front more majestic of sea-mountains nowhere is there 
uplifted the whole earth through, — ■ 

whose legitimate place is in a rhetorical text- 
book, as an exercise in redundance. Mr. Wood- 
berry is occasionally allured by his theme until 
the song outruns the motive, but he rarely pads 
a line like this ; even poetic hyperbole has a 
limit. 

In picturesque imagery his work is finely 
individualized ; witness the figurative beauty 
of the following lines: 

The ocean, storming on the rocks, 
Shepherds not there his wild, wet flocks. 



210 The Younger American Poets 

The soaring ether nowhere finds 
An eyrie for the winged winds ; 
Nor has yon glittering sky a charm 
To hive in heaven the starry swarm ; 
And so thy wandering thoughts, my heart, 
No home shall find ; let them depart. 

The two sonnets "At Gibraltar" represent, 
perhaps, as fine an achievement as distinguishes 
Mr. Woodberry's work. It would, indeed, be 
difficult to surpass them in American literature 
of to-day in strength, passion, or ideality : 



England, I stand on thy imperial ground, 
Not all a stranger ; as thy bugles blow, 
I feel within my blood old battles flow — 
The blood whose ancient founts in thee are found. 
Still surging dark against the Christian bound 
Wide Islam presses ; well its peoples know 
Thy heights that watch them wandering below ; 
I think how Lucknow heard their gathering sound. 
I turn, and meet the cruel, turbaned face. 
England, 'tis sweet to be so much thy son ! 
I feel the conqueror in my blood and race ; 
Last night Trafalgar awed me, and to-day 
Gibraltar wakened ; hark, thy evening gun 
Startles the desert over Africa ! 

II 

Thou art the rock of empire, set mid-seas 
Between the East and West, that God has built; 
Advance thy Roman borders where thou wilt, 
While run thy armies true with His decrees. 



George E. Woodberry 211 

Law, justice, liberty — great gifts are these; 
Watch that they spread where English blood is spilt, 
Lest, mixed and sullied with his country's guilt, 
The soldier's life-stream flow, and Heaven displease ! 
Two swords there are : one naked, apt to smite, 
Thy blade of war; and, battle-storied, one 
Rejoices in the sheath, and hides from light. 
American I am ; would wars were done ! 
Now westward, look, my country bids good-night — 
Peace to the world from ports without a gun ! 

Whether in his travels or in the quiet of his 
own contemplation, the emphasis of Mr. Wood- 
berry's thought is upon the noble, the essen- 
tial, the beautiful. Although not a strongly 
creative poet in form, he is a highly cultivated 
poet, and hands on the nobler traditions of art; 
and if now and then he wraps another's "sing- 
ing robe " about him, it is but an external 
vesture, leaving the soul of his thought un- 
changed. 



XI 

FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES 

MR. FREDERIC LAWRENCE 
KNOWLES is one of the younger 
poets about whose work there is no 
veneer. This is not to imply that it lacks finish, 
but rather that the foundation is genuine ; it re- 
flects its native grain, and not an overlaid polish. 
One feels back of the work the probity and 
directness that underlie all soundly conditioned 
literature ; for while Mr. Knowles has the 
poet's passion for the beauties of the art he 
essays, the primary value is always in that to 
be conveyed rather than in the medium of 
transmission. 

This sincerity is at once Mr. Knowles' dis- 
tinction and his danger. He is so manifestly 
in earnest that one feels at times in his work 
a certain lack of the imaginative leaven which 
should lighten the most serious thought; to 
put it in a word, there is often an over- 
strenuous note in his poetry ; but were it put 
to a choice between this mood and the honeyed 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 213 

artificialities to which one is often treated, there 
would be no hesitancy in choosing the former, 
for 

The poet is not fed on sweets ; 

Daily his own heart he eats, — 

not morbidly, but finding within his own spirit 
daily manna, and living by this aliment and not 
by the mere nectar of things. Everything in life 
bestows this manna and daily renews it; and 
the poet is he who assimilates and transmutes 
it to personal needs until his thought is fed 
from his own heart as in Emerson's couplet. 
This is Mr, Knowles' ideal of growth, evi- 
denced by the eager interest and open sym- 
pathy with which he seeks from life its elements 
of truth, and from experience its developing 
properties. It is, of course, an ideal beyond 
his present attainment, probably beyond his 
ultimate attainment, gauged by absolute stand- 
ards, for the " elements of truth " are hardly 
to be separated from life by one magnet. 
They are variously polarized, and though one 
may possess the divining wand that shall dis- 
close the nature and place of certain of them, 
there is no wand polarized for all ; but it is the 
poet's part to pass that magnet of truth which 
is his by nature over the field of life, that it may 



214 The Younger American Poets 

attract therefrom its range of affinities, and this 
Mr. Knowles is doing. 

Before taking up his later work, however, 
we may glance at his matin songs, On Lifes 
Stairway, which have many indicative notes 
worthy of consideration. This volume, that 
called forth from John Burroughs, Richard 
Henry Stoddard, Joaquin Miller, and others, 
such hearty commendation, has an individuality 
that makes itself felt. First, perhaps, one notes 
its spontaneity and the evident love of song 
that is its primal impulse. The fancy is fresh 
and sprightly, not having yet thought's heavier 
freight; the optimism is robust, the loyalty to 
one's own time impassioned and absolute, and 
the democracy and Americanism distinguish- 
ing it are of the commendable, if somewhat 
grandiloquent, type belonging to youthful 
patriotism. Another feature of Mr. Knowles' 
work, manifest in both volumes, is that its in- 
spiration is from life rather than nature, which 
is refreshing in view of the fact that the reverse 
obtains with most of the younger poets. When, 
however, he comes to this theme, it is with a 
lightness of touch and a pleasant charm of 
mood that give to the few poems of this sub- 
ject an airy delicacy and an unpremeditated 
note, as in these lines: 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 215 

Nature, in thy largess, grant 
I may be thy confidant ! 



Show me how dry branches throw 
Such blue shadows on the snow ; 
Tell me how the wind can fare 
On his unseen feet of air ; 
Show me how the spider's loom 
Weaves the fabric from her womb ; 
Lead me to those brooks of morn 
Where a woman's laugh is born ; 
Let me taste the sap that flows 
Through the blushes of a rose, — 
Yea, and drain the blood which runs 
From the heart of dying suns ; 
Teach me how the butterfly 
Guessed at immortality ; 
Let me follow up the track 
Of Love's deathless zodiac 
Where Joy climbs among the spheres 
Circled by her moon of tears. 

In his poems upon love, Mr. Knowles touches 
some of his truest and surest notes; those in the 
second volume have a broader and more sym- 
pathetic appeal, and yet have not lost the con- 
fessional note which alone gives value to the 
subject. They are not invariably of a more 
inspired touch than are several in the first col- 
lection, such as "Lost Knowledge," "A Song 
for Simplicity," and " Love's Prayer ; " now and 
again they combine some newly minted phrase 



216 The Younger American Poets 

flashing with unsullied lustre, with such as 
have passed from hand to hand in the dull- 
ing commerce of language ; but it is perhaps 
too much to demand that all fancies shall be 
newly stamped with the die of imagination. 
One of Mr. Knowles' strongest poems from 
the group in question is entitled " Love's 
World ; " but for greater brevity I shall quote 
instead these charming lines which introduce 
the collection called Love Triumphant : 

Helen's lips are drifting dust, 

Ilion is consumed with rust ; 

All the galleons of Greece 

Drink the ocean's dreamless peace ; 

Lost was Solomon's purple show 

Restless centuries ago ; 

Stately empires wax and wane — 

Babylon, Barbary and Spain — 

Only one thing, undefaced, 

Lasts, though all the worlds lie waste 

And the heavens are overturned. 

— Dea», how long ago we learned ! 

There 's a sight that blinds the sun, ' 
Sound that lives when sounds are done, 
Music that rebukes the birds, 
Language lovelier than words, 
Hue and scent that shame the rose, 
Wine no earthly vineyard knows, 
Silence stiller than the shore 
Swept by Charon's stealthy oar, 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 217 

Ocean more divinely free 
Than Pacific's boundless sea, — 
Ye who love have learned it true. 
— Dear, how long ago we knew ! 

Of this group, however, it is in the sonnet, " If 
Love Were Jester at the Court of Death," that 
Mr. Knowles' most genuine inspiration has 
visited him. 

The conception of the sonnet is unique, 
and its opening line of epigrammatic force 
and suggestiveness : 

If Love were jester at the court of Death, 
And Death the king of all, still would I pray, 
" For me the motley and the bauble, yea, 

Though all be vanity, as the Preacher saith, 

The mirth of love be mine for one brief breath! " 
Then would I kneel the monarch to obey, 
And kiss that pale hand, should it spare or slay ; 

Since I have tasted love, what mattereth ! 

But if, dear God ! this heart be dry as sand, 
And cold as Charon's palm holding Hell's toll, 

How worse ! how worse ! Scorch it with sorrow's brand ! 
Haply, though dead to joy, 't would feel that coal \ 

Better a cross and nails through either hand, 
Than Pilate's palace and a frozen soul ! 

Here are originality, strength, and white heat 
of feeling, though the sestett is less artistic 
than the octave, which holds the creative 
beauty of the sonnet. 



218 The Younger American Poets 

Of the lyrical poems in the second volume 
there are many clear of tone, having not only 
a pure, enunciative quality musically, but also 
color and picturesqueness, as that beginning : 

With all his purple spoils upon him 
Creeps back the plunderer Sea, 

with its succession of pictures such as these : 

O bandit, with the white-plumed horsemen, 

Raiding a thousand shores, 
Thy coffers crammed with spars and anchors 

And wave-defeated oars ! 

Admirable phrasing is that of " wave -defeated 
oars " ! But before taking up the more stren- 
uous side of his work, there is another lyric 
rich in melody and emotion, — a lyric in which 
one feels the under-current of passion. It is 
named, " A Song of Desire " : 

Thou dreamer with the million moods, 

Of restless heart like me, 
Lay thy white hands against my breast 

And cool its pain, O Sea ! 

O wanderer of the unseen paths, 

Restless of heart as I, 
Blow hither from thy caves of blue, 

Wind of the healing skyi 

O treader of the fiery way, 

With passionate heart like mine, 
Hold to my lips thy healthful cup 

Brimmed with its blood-red wine ! 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 219 

O countless watchers of the night, 

Of sleepless heart like me, 
Pour your white beauty in my soul, 

Till I grow calm as ye ! 

O sea, O sun, O wind and stars, 

(O hungry heart that longs !) 
Feed my starved lips with life, with love, 

And touch my tongue with songs ! 

Mr. Knowles is a modern of the moderns, 
and his Whitmanesque conviction that " we 
tally all antecedents ; " that " we are the scald, 
the oracle, the monk, and the knight ; " that 
" we easily include them and more," — finds 
expression in each of his volumes, in poems 
ranging from boyish fustian, at which he would 
now smile, to the noble lines of " Veritas " and 
other poems in the later work. There are cer- 
tain subjects that hold within them percussion 
powder ready to explode at the touch of a 
thought, — subjects which, to one's own pe- 
culiar temperament, seem to be provocative of 
a fulminant outburst whenever one collides 
with them, and this is such an one to Mr. 
Knowles. However, it is well to be shaken up 
occasionally by such detonating lines as these : 

We have sonnets enough, and songs enough, 

And ballads enough, God knows ! 
But what we need is that cosmic stuff 

Whence primitive feeling glows, 



220 The Younger American Poets 

Grown, organized to the needs of rhyme 

Through the old instinctive laws, 
With a meaning broad as the boughs of time 

And deep as the roots of cause. 

It is passion and power that we need to-day, 

We have grace and taste full store ; 
We need a man who will say his say 

With a strength unguessed before : — 

Whose lines shall glow like molten steel 

From being forged in his soul, 
Till the very anvil shall burn to feel 

The breath of the quenchless coal ! 

Your dainty wordsters may cry " Uncouth ! n 
As they shrink from his bellows' glow ; 

But the fire he fans is immortal youth, 
And how should the bloodless know ! 

One will hardly deny that this is sound 
doctrine, as are the stanzas necessarily omitted, 
which trace the qualifications of the bard of 
to-day. Assuredly one touches the question 
of questions when he seeks the cause for the 
apparent waning of poetic inspiration in our 
own time. There is certainly no wane in the 
diffusion of the poetic impulse ; but the poet 
who is answering the great questions of the 
age, speaking the indicative words of the fu- 
ture, — to quote Mr. Knowles, 

A voice whose sagas shall live with God 
When the lyres of earth are rust, — 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 221 

is hardly being heard at the present hour. 
There are voices and voices which proclaim 
truths, but the voice that enunciates Truth in 
its larger utterance — as it is spoken, for exam- 
ple, in the words of Browning — seems not to 
find expression in our day. From this the im- 
pression has come to prevail that Art is chok- 
ing virility of utterance, and that a wholly new 
order of song must grow from newer needs, — 
song that shall express our national masculinity, 
our robust democracy, our enlarged patriotism, 
and our sometimes bumptious Americanism ; 
that labor must have its definite poet, and 
the " hymn to the workman's God " contain 
some different note from that hitherto chanted. 
To put it in Mr. Knowles' stirring words 
from another poem : 

In the ink of our sweat we will find it yet, 
The song that is fit for men ! 

And the woodsman he shall sing it, 

And his axe shall mark the time ; 
And the bearded lips of the boatman 

While his oarblades fall in rhyme ; 

And the man with his fist on the throttle, 
And the man with his foot on the brake, 

And the man who will scoff at danger 
And die for a comrade's sake ; 



222 The Younger American Poets 

And the Hand that wrought the Vision 
With prairie and peak and stream 

Shall guide the hand of the workman 
And help him to trace his dream ! — 

Till the rugged lines grow perfect, 

And round to a faultless whole ; 
For the West will have found her singer 

When her singer has found his soul. 

These are fine, swinging strophes, proclaim- 
ing the modern ideal from Whitman to Kip- 
ling that " the song that is fit for men " must 
have in it some robust timbre, some resonant 
fibre, unheard before ; that a sturdier race of 
bards must arise, " sprung from the toilers at 
the bench and plough," — that, in fine, the new 
America must have a more orotund voice to 
sing her needs. 

This has a convincing plausibility on the 
face of it; but do the facts bear it out, — are 
virility and democracy and modernity the es- 
sential elements of the " song that is fit for 
men"? If so, then Whitman, who is the apo- 
gee of the elemental and democratic, or Kip- 
ling, whose tunes blare in one's ears like the 
horns of a band, and whose themes are aggres- 
sively of the day and hour, would be the ideal 
types of the new-day poet, and we should find 
the sturdy laborer and the common folk in 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 223 

general coming to these sources for refresh- 
ment, inspiration, and aid in tracing their 
dreams; but, on the contrary, Whitman, by a 
frequent paradox of letters, is a poet for the 
most cultivated and deeply reflective minds. 
Only such can understand and embrace his 
universality, and, on the poetic side, enjoy his 
splendid diction and the wave -like sweep of 
his rhythms. His formlessness, which was 
reactive that he might come the nearer to the 
common heart, is one of the chief barriers that 
prevent this contact. The unlettered nature, 
more than all others, demands the ordered 
symmetry of rhythm as a focus and aid to 
thought; it demands elemental beauties as 
well as truths, and hence not only is Whitman 
ruled out by his own measure, but Kipling 
also, for again it needs the broadly cultivated 
mind to take at his true and at his relative 
value a poet like Kipling. The common mind 
might be familiar with some poem of occasion, 
the English laborer might be found singing 
" Tommy Atkins ; " but Kipling's finer shadings 
would escape in the beat of his galloping tunes 
and in the touch-and-go of his subjects. 

If, then, Kipling, who outmoderns the mod- 
erns in singing what is presumably a song fit for 
men, and if Whitman, who is as robustly, demo- 



224 The Younger American Poets 

cratically American as a poet can well be, and 
trumpeting ever that note, — if these poets do 
not reach the typical man, if they are not the 
ones to whom the stalwart laborer comes, or the 
busy man of affairs, there must be a need an- 
terior to that of which they sing ; song must 
spell something else besides virility, democracy, 
achievement. It evidently is not the men who 
do, not the men who act, that write " the song of 
fact " for the laborer and the great class of our 
strong, sincere, common folk. They do not 
want the song of fact more than do we; they 
have no other dream to trace than have we. 
They want the primal things, — love, hope, 
beauty, the transforming ideal ; they want the 
carbon of their daily experience turned to the 
crystal ; and for this they go to a poet like 
Burns, who spoke the universal tongue, who 
took the common ideals and touched them 
simply, tenderly, not strenuously, to a new form 
at the will of his fancy. You shall find the 
boatman or the woodsman knowing his Burns, 
often his Shakespeare, for he is quick to grasp 
the human element, or his Scott, for he loves 
romance, when the strident cry of a Kipling, 
or of a modern idealist singing of democracy, 
or of the newer needs of the laborer himself, 
will be wholly lost on him ; and hence this note 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 225 

that one is meeting so often in the recent poets 
seems to me to be a false and superfluous one. 

The "song that is fit for men" is any song 
that has the essence of truth and beauty in it, 
and no other is fit for men, no matter where 
sung. We have not evolved a new genus homo 
by our conquest of arms; our democracy is not 
changing human nature ; we need virility in 
song, as Mr. Knowles has said in the earlier 
poem quoted; we need that "cosmic stuff 
whence primitive feeling glows," but we need 
beauty and spirituality to shape it. Poetry 
must minister first of all to the inner life. 
Tennyson and Browning were not concerned 
with matters of empire, or the passing issues of 
the day; they were occupied with the essential 
things, — things of humanity and of the soul, 
that shall outlast empire, democracy, or time. 
Heaven forefend that our bards shall spring 
from a race 

Unkempt, athletic, rude, 

Rough as the prairies, tameless as the sea, 

rather let them spring from the very ripest, 
richest-natured class of men and women, not 
servile to custom, but having the breadth of 
vision, the poise, the fine and harmonious 
development that flowers from the highest 

IS 



226 The Younger American Poets 

cultivation, whether in the schools or in life. 
It did not emasculate the work of Browning 
or Milton or Goethe, nor of our own Lowell, 
or many another, that he had the most pro- 
found enrichment that education and tradi- 
tional culture could give him. Originality is 
not crushed by cultivation, nor will native 
impulse go far without it. The need is of a 
poet who shall divine the underlying harmonies 
of life, who shall stimulate and develop the 
higher nature, and disclose the alchemizing 
truth that shall transmute the gross ore of 
experience into the fine metal of character and 
spiritual beauty, — such a poet as Mr. Knowles 
himself may become when his idealism shall 
have taken on that inner sight of the mystic 
which now he shows so definitely in certain 
phases of his work. 

He is readier in general to see life's benign 
face than its malign one, even though shapen 
by pain and guilt; and this brings us to the 
group of poems from his new volume, Love 
Triumphant, turning upon Sin and Remorse, 
and presenting an element of human passion 
at once the most provocative of degradation 
and the most susceptible of spiritual elevation. 

Whitman approached this theme from the 
cosmic standpoint as he would approach any of 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 227 

the universalities of life, not specifically from 
the spiritual side, in its destiny-shaping effects. 
It is from this side that Mr. Knowles essays 
its consideration, presenting chiefly the reactive, 
retributive phase of guilt, — the sudden spirit- 
ual isolation of the soul that has sinned, as if 
the golden doors that opened on the world had 
transformed to iron bars imprisoning the soul 
within its cell of memory. This sense of de- 
tachment, of having unwittingly plucked one- 
self from the flowering beauty of life, of being 
irrevocably cut off from sap and stem, which is 
the first and most palpable phase of guilt, 
predominates in several of the poems. To 
consider it first, then, the stanzas called " Lost" 
may be cited as illustrative: 

Night scattered gold-dust in the eyes of Earth, 
My heart was blinded by the excess of stars 
As, filled with youth and joy, I kept the Way. 

The solitary and unweaponed Sun 

Slew all the hosts of darkness with a smile, 

And it was Dawn. And still I kept the Way. 

The winds, those hounds that only God can leash, 
Bayed on my track, and made the morning wild 
With loud confusion, but I kept the Way. 

The hours climbed high. Peace, where the zenith broods, 
Fell, a blue feather from the wings of Heav'n. 
Lo ! it was Noon. And still I kept the Way. 



228 The Younger American Poets 

At length one met me as my footsteps flagged, — 
Within her eyes oblivion, on her lips 
Delirious dreams — and I forgot the Way. 

And still we wander — who knows whitherward, 

Our sandals torn, in either face despair, 

Passion burnt out — God ! I have lost the Way ! 

Here is strong and vivid imagery, especially in 
the third stanza, 

The winds, those hounds that only God can leash, 

which is a bold and fine stroke not merely in its 
metaphorical phrasing, but as a symbol of hu- 
man passions. The entire poem is a vivid piece 
of symbolism ; it is, however, but one phase 
of the subject, and in " One Woman " and 
" Sin's Foliage " one comes again face to face 
with the same phase, with that terrible memory- 
haunted eidolon, the visage of one's own de- 
faced soul. It is in the poem " Betrayed " that 
a truer perspective begins to be manifest, of 
which one stanza — 

Yet were his hands and conscience clean ; 

Some monstrous Folly rose unseen 

To teach him crimes he could not mean — 

introduces a truth that strikes deeper than the 
mere spell of impulse, — a truth that suggests 
the mystery of election in crime : whether one 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 229 

is wholly responsible for the choice which in 
a moment becomes the pivotal event of his 
destiny, or whether what Maeterlinck has 
called the " conniving voices that we cherish at 
the depths of us " summoned the event, and 
impelled him inevitably toward its hazard; and, 
further, whether these voices are not often the 
commissioned voices, calling one thus to arouse 
from the somnolence of his soul. On the 
morrow of the hour in which he has 

. . . fallen from Heav'n to Hell 
In one mad moment's fateful spell, 

and finds himself in the isolation of his own 
spirit, — consciousness will awaken, life will be 
perceived, sympathy will be born, and Pain, 
with the daily transfiguring face, will com- 
panion him, until in the years he again meet 
Love and the other fair shapes of his destiny. 
Since no one remains in the hell to which 
he has fallen, but by his own choosing, Life 
rebukes the Art that leaves this sense of 
finality; for the hour of tragedy is rather the 
beginning than the end, and often so mani- 
festly the birth of the soul into spiritual con- 
sciousness that it may well seem that apparent 
sin is the mere agency of the higher forces of 
the nature, the shock that displaces ignorance 



230 The Younger American Poets 

and smug self-complacency and both human- 
izes and deifies the soul. 

In other poems of the group, however, the 
developing power of sin, and the remedial forces 
which it evokes for the renewal of the nature, 
are dwelt upon, so that the poems are redeemed 
at the last from the impression of hopeless 
finality which obtained in the earlier ones. 

Few of the younger poets have a more vital 
and personal conviction of spiritual things than 
Mr. Knowles, and its evolution is interesting to 
note. There is abundant evidence in his earlier 
verse that he was bred after the strictest letter 
of the law ; but while his faith was " fixed to 
form," it was seeking " centre everywhere," and 
the later volume widens to an encompassing 
view worthy the vision of a poet, — the view 
that finds nothing impervious to the irradiation 
of spirit. It is variously sung, but most nobly, 
perhaps, in the following poem : 

In buds upon some Aaron's rod 
The childlike ancient saw his God ; 
Less credulous, more believing, we 
Read in the grass — Divinity. 

From Horeb's bush the Presence spoke 
To earlier faiths and simpler folk ; 
But now each bush that sweeps our fence 
Flames with the awful Immanence ! 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 231 

To old Zacchaeus in his tree 

What mattered leaves and botany? 

His sycamore was but a seat 

Whence he could watch that hallowed street. 

But now to us each elm and pine 
Is vibrant with the Voice divine, 
Not only from but in the bough 
Our larger creed beholds Him now. 

To the true faith, bark, sap and stem 
Are wonderful as Bethlehem ; 
No hill nor brook nor field nor herd 
But mangers the incarnate Word ! 

Again we touch the healing hem 

In Nazareth or Jerusalem ; 

We trace again those faultless years ; 

The cross commands our wondering tears. 

Yet if to us the Spirit writes 
On Morning's manuscript and Night's, 
In gospels of the growing grain, 
Epistles of the pond and plain, 

In stars, in atoms, as they roll 
Each tireless round its occult pole, 
In wing and worm and fin and fleece, 
In the wise soil's surpassing peace, — 

Thrice ingrate he whose only look 
Is backward focused on the Book, 
Neglectful what the Presence saith, 
Though He be near as blood and breath ! 



232 The Younger American Poets 

The only atheist is one 
Who hears no voice in wind or sun, 
Believer in some primal curse, 
Deaf in God's loving universe ! 

Mr. Knowles has not embraced the diffusive 
faith that has no faith to stay it, but is en- 
deavoring to read the newer meaning into the 
older truths, which is the present-day office of 
singer and seer. In the matter of personal valor, 
of optimistic, intrepid mood, Mr. Knowles' 
work is altogether commendable. He awaits 
with buoyant cheer what lies beyond the turn 
o' the road. His poem " Fear," from the 
first collection, was widely quoted at the time 
because of its heartening tone, and in his new 
volume, " A Challenge," " A Twofold Prayer," 
and many another sounds the same invincible 
note. " Laus Mortis " is a hymn to death hold- 
ing within it the truer acceptation of that 
natural and therefore kindly change: 

Nay, why should I fear Death, 
Who gives us life, and in exchange takes breath? 

He is like cordial Spring 
That lifts above the soil each buried thing ; 

Like autumn, kind and brief — 
The frost that chills the branches frees the leaf; 

Like winter's stormy hours 
That spread their fleece of snow to save the flowers. 



Frederic Lawrence Knowles 233 

The lordliest of all things, 
Life lends us only feet, Death gives us wings. 

Fearing no covert thrust, 
Let me walk onward, armed in valiant trust ; 

Dreading no unseen knife, 
Across Death's threshold step from life to life ! 

O all ye frightened folk, 
Whether ye wear a crown or bear a yoke, 

Laid in one equal bed, 
When once your coverlet of grass is spread, 

What daybreak need you fear? — 
The Love will rule you there that guides you here ! 

Where Life, the sower, stands, 
Scattering the ages from his swinging hands, 

Thou waitest, Reaper lone, 
Until the multitudinous grain hath grown. 

Scythe-bearer, when Thy blade 
Harvests my flesh, let me be unafraid. 

God's husbandman thou art, 
In His unwithering sheaves, O bind my heart ! 

Mr. Knowles' work is virile, earnest, individ- 
ual, free from affectation or imitation ; modern 
in spirit, recognizing the significance of to- 
day, and its part in the finer realization of to- 
morrow ; sympathetic in feeling, and spiritual 



234 The Younger American Poets 

in vision. Its limitations are such as may be 
trusted to time, being chiefly incident to the 
earnestness noted above, which now and again 
borders on didacticism. Excess of conviction 
is, however, a safer equipment for art than a 
philosophy already parting with its enthusiasms 
by the tempering of life, being more likely to 
undergo the shaping of experience without 
losing the vital part. 



XII 

ALICE BROWN 

MISS ALICE BROWN has published 
but one volume of verse ; but we live 
in feelings, not in titles on a cover, 
and it is possible to prove oneself a poet in one 
volume of verse, or in one poem thereof. When 
Miss Brown some years ago paid this tribute at 
the toll-gate of song by a small volume entitled 
The Road to Castaly, it created no incon- 
siderable comment among lovers of poetry, 
and there were not wanting those who saw 
in it as definite gifts as Miss Brown possesses 
in fiction ; but despite the generous recognition 
which the collection won, she has not seen fit 
to follow it with others, and with the exception 
of occasional poems in the magazines, it remains 
the sole representation of this phase of her 
work. Yet within a range of seventy pages she 
has gathered a stronger group of poems than 
might be winnowed from several collections of 
some of those who cultivate verse more assidu- 
ously. Nor is this to declare that from cover 
to cover of her volume the inspired touch is 



236 The Younger American Poets 

everywhere manifest; doubtless the seventy 
pages would have gained in strength by com- 
pression to fifty. It is, however, to declare 
that within this compass there is a true accom- 
plishment, at which we shall look briefly. 

First, then, the work has personality and 
magnetism, bringing one at once into sympa- 
thetic interchange with the writer. The feel- 
ing is not insulated by the art, but is imbued 
with all the warmth of speech ; there are no 
"wires" but the live wires of vibrant words, 
conducting their current of impulse directly to 
the reader. One feels that Miss Brown has 
written verse not as a pleasant diversion, nor 
yet with painful self-scrutiny, but only when 
her nature demanded this form of expression, 
and hence the motive shapes the mechanism, 
rather than the reverse. 

Miss Brown's poems are not primarily philo- 
sophical, not ethical to the degree of being 
moralistic ; but they have a subtly pervasive 
spirituality, and in certain lyrics, such as 
" Hora Christi," a rare depth of religious emo- 
tion. They are records of moods : of the soul, 
of passing life, of the psychic side of death, of 
the mutability of love, of ecstatic surrender to 
nature, of loyalty to service, — in short, they 
are poems of the intuitions and sympathies, 



Alice Brown 237 

and warm with personality. Perhaps the most 
buoyant note in the book is that in cele- 
bration of the joys of escape from town to 
country; from the thrall of paving-stones and 
chimney-pots to the indesecrate seclusion of the 
pines, where the springy pile of the woodland 
carpet gives forth a pungent odor to the tread ; 
and where, in Miss Brown's delicate phrase, 

the ferns waver, wakened by no wind 
Save the green flickering of their blossomy mind. 

To read Miss Brown's " Morning in Camp " 
is to take a vacation without stirring from one's 
armchair, — a vacation by a mountain lake en- 
girt with pine forests, with one's tent pitched 
below the " spice-budded " firs and " shimmer- 
ing birches," guarded by 

... the mountain wall 
Where the first potencies of dawning fall, 

and within sight of the shore where 

. . . the water laps the land, 
Encircling her with charm of silvery sand ; 

and where one may lie at dawn in his " tent's 
white solitude," conscious of 

. . . the rapt ecstatic birth 
Renewed without : the mirrored sky and earth, 
Married in beauty, consonant in speech, 
And uttering bliss responsive each to each. 



238 The Younger American Poets 

Miss Brown's rapt poems in celebration of 
nature range from the impassioned dignity of 
her stanzas picturing a "Sunrise on Mans- 
field Mountain ' : to fancies so delicate that 
they seem to be caught in gossamer meshes 
of song. The poems are somewhat inadapt- 
able to quotation, as several of the best, such 
as " Wood-Longing," " Pan," and " Escape," 
are written in stanzas whose exuberant impulse 
carries them so far that they may not be excised 
midway without destroying a climax. Upon a 
first reading of some of these periods they give 
one an impression of being over-sustained ; but 
the imagery is clear, and upon a second reading 
one is likely to catch the infection of the lines 
and be borne on with them to the reversal of 
his first judgment. "Wood-Longing" thrills 

with the passion of 

. . . the earth 
When all the ecstasy of myriad birth 
Afflicts her with a rapturous shuddering, 

and celebrating escape from the thraldom of 
books, it demands of the soul: 

Spirit, what wilt thou dare, 

Just to be one with earth and air? 

To read the writing on the river bed, 

And trace God's mystical mosaic overhead ? 



Alice Brown 239 

O incommunicable speech ! 

For he who reads a book may preach 

A hundred sermons from its foolish rote 

And rhyme reiterant on one dull note. 

But he who spends an hour within the wood 

Hath fed on fairy food ; 

And who hath eaten of the forest fruit 

Is ever mute. 

Nothing may he reveal. 

Nature hath set her seal 

Of honor on anointed lips ; 

And one who daring dips 

His cup within her potent brew 

Hath drunk of silence too. 

What doth the robin say, 

And what the martial jay ? 

Who '11 swear the bluebird's lilt is all of love, 

Or who translate the desolation of the dove ? 

For even in the common speech 

Of feathered fellows, each to each, 

Abideth still the primal mystery, 

The brooding past, the germ of life to be ; 

And one poor weed, upspringing to the sun, 

Breeds all creation's wonder, new begun. 

"Sunrise on Mansfield Mountain," written 
in fine resonant pentameter, and building up 
stanza by stanza to the supreme climax of the 
dawn, is, as noted above, one of the finest 
achievements of Miss Brown's volume, but one 
that will least bear the severing of its passages 
from their place in the growing whole. It is 



240 The Younger American Poets 

full of notable phrases, as that in the apos- 
trophe, — 

O changeless guardians ! O ye wizard firs ! 



What breath may move ye, or what breeze invite 
To odorous hot lendings of the heart? — 

wherein the very pungency of the pine is 
infused into the words. But more adaptable 
to quotation in its compactness is the lyric en- 
titled " Candlemas," captivating in form and 
spontaneity, though no more felicitous in 
fancy or rhythm than many other of her na- 
ture poems : 

O hearken, all ye little weeds 
That lie beneath the snow, 
(So low, dear hearts, in poverty so low !) 
The sun hath risen for royal deeds, 
A valiant wind the vanguard leads ; 
Now quicken ye, lest unborn seeds 
Before ye rise and blow. 

O furry living things, adream 
On winter's drowsy breast, 
(How rest ye there, how softly, safely rest !) 
Arise and follow where a gleam 
Of wizard gold unbinds the stream, 
And all the woodland windings seem 
With sweet expectance blest. 



Alice Brown 241 

My birds, come back ! the hollow sky 
Is weary for your note. 
(Sweet-throat, come back ! O liquid, mellow throat !) 
Ere May's soft minions hereward fly, 
Shame on ye, laggards, to deny 
The brooding breast, the sun-bright eye, 
The tawny, shining coat ! 

Mr. Archer, in his Poets of the Younger Gen- 
eration, quotes this poem as the gem of Miss 
Brown's collection ; and it certainly is a charm- 
ing lyric, but not more so to my thinking than 
several of an entirely different nature, which 
will also in time's trial by fire remain the true 
coin. It needs a somewhat broader and deeper 
term, however, than " charming " to qualify 
such poems as " Hora Christi," " On Pilgrim- 
age," " Seaward Bound," " The Return," " The 
Message," " The Slanderer," " Lethe," and " In 
Extremis," in which life speaks a word charged 
with more vital significance. " On Pilgrimage " 
(a. d. 1250) reveals an art that is above 
praise. With only the simplest words Miss 
Brown has infused into this poem the very 
essence of pain, of numb, bewildered hopeless- 
ness. One feels it as a palpable atmosphere : 

My love hath turned her to another mate. 

(O grief too strange for tears !) 
So must I make the barren earth my home ; 
So do I still on feeble questing roam, 
16 



242 The Younger American Poets 

An outcast from mine own unfriending gate, 
Through the wan years. 

My love hath rid her of my patient heart. 

(Wake not, O frozen breast !) 
Yet still there 's one to pour her oil and wine, 
And all life's banquet counteth most divine. 
O Thou, Who also hadst in joy no part, 
Give me Thy rest ! 

What strength have I to cleanse Thy stolen tomb, 

For Christendom's release ? 
Naked, at last, of hope and trust am I, 
Too weak to sue for human charity. 
A beggar to Thy holy shrine I come. 
Grant me but peace ! 

And now in contrast with these exquisitely pa- 
thetic lines, to show that the tragic side of life 
is not alone interpreted in Miss Brown's verse, 
and that she sees the temperamental contrasts 
of passion, witness the cavalier parting of this 
" West-Country Lover," to whom the light o' 
love is too fatuous a gleam to risk one's way in 
following. The dash and spirit of these lines 
are worthy a seventeenth-century gallant : 

Then, lady, at last thou art sick of my sighing. 

Good-bye ! 

So long as I sue, thou wilt still be denying? 

Good-bye ! 

Ah, well ! shall I vow then to serve thee forever, 

And swear no unkindness our kinship can sever? 

Nay, nay, dear my lass ! here 's an end of endeavor. 

Good-bye ! 



Alice Brown 243 

Yet let no sweet ruth for my misery grieve thee. 

Good-bye ! 

The man who has loved knows as well how to leave thee. 

Good-bye ! 

The gorse is enkindled, there 's bloom on the heather, 

And love is my joy, but so too is fair weather ; 

I still ride abroad, though we ride not together. 

Good-bye ! 

My horse is my mate ; let the wind be my master. 

Good-bye ! 

Though Care may pursue, yet my hound follows faster. 

Good-bye ! 

The red deer 's a-tremble in coverts unbroken. 

He hears the hoof-thunder ; he scents the death-token. 

Shall I mope at home, under vows never spoken ? 

Good-bye ! 

The brown earth 's my book, and I ride forth to read it. 

Good-bye ! 

The stream runneth fast, but my will shall outspeed it. 

Good-bye ! 

I love thee, dear lass, but I hate the hag Sorrow. 

As sun follows rain, and to-night has its morrow, 

So I '11 taste of joy, though I steal, beg, or borrow ! 

Good-bye ! 

This is as admirable a bit of nonchalance as 
Wither's, 

Shall I, wasting in despair, 
Die because a woman 's fair? 

or Suckling's, 

Why so pale and wan, fond lover, 
Prithee, why so pale? 



244 The Younger American Poets 

with its salient advice to the languishing 
adorer. 

Miss Brown's small volume is by no means 
lacking in variety, either in theme or form ; it 
is full of spontaneous music, rarely forcing the 
note in any lyric inspiration. In the sonnet 
she is less at ease : here one feels the effort, 
the mechanism ; but only four sonnets are in- 
cluded in the volume, which shows her to be 
a true critic. There are certain poems that 
might, perhaps, with equal advantage have 
been eliminated, such as the over-musical num- 
bers to Dian and Endymion ; but in the main, 
Miss Brown has done her own blue-pencil- 
ling, and The Road to Castaly, as stated in the 
beginning, maintains a fine and even grade of 
workmanship. 

In such poems as are touched to tenderness 
and reverence, half with the sweetness and half 
with the pain of life, Miss Brown makes her 
truest appeal. The fine ideality, the spiritual 
fealty of her nature, as shown in her work, 
always relates itself to one on the human side. 
It is not the fealty that shames a weaker 
nature by its rigid steadfastness, but that in 
which one sees his own wavering strife re- 
flected. Her lines called " The Artisan," 1 

1 Copyright, 1903, by Harper and Brothers. 



Alice Brown 245 

written since the publication of her volume, are 
instinct with such feeling as comment would 
profane. One can but feel, with a quick pang 
of sympathy, that he, too, makes the appeal : 

O God, my master God, look down and see 
If I am making what Thou wouldst of me. 
Fain might I lift my hands up in the air 
From the defiant passion of my prayer ; 
Yet here they grope on this cold altar stone, 
Graving the words I think I should make known. 
Mine eyes are Thine. Yea, let me not forget, 
Lest with unstaunched tears I leave them wet, 
Dimming their faithful power, till they not see 
Some small, plain task that might be done for Thee. 
My feet, that ache for paths of flowery bloom, 
Halt steadfast in the straitness of this room. 
Though they may never be on errands sent, 
Here shall they stay, and wait Thy full content. 
And my poor heart, that doth so crave for peace, 
Shall beat until Thou bid its beating cease. 
So, Thou dear master God, look down and see 
Whether I do Thy bidding needfully. 

These lines well illustrate the fact that true 
emotion is not literary nor self-observant, and 
does not cast about for some rare image in 
which to enshrine itself. Here is the simplest 
Saxon, and wholly without ornament, yet who 
could be unconscious of the heart-beat of life 
in the words ? In her poem, " In Extremis," 
one is moved by the same intensity of feeling 



246 The Younger American Poets 

expressed in the litany imploring deliverance 
from fear. 

Of the more purely devotional poems, " Hora 
Christi " is perhaps the most reverent, and in- 
stinct with delicate simplicity. It is a song of 
the spirit, interpreting a mood whose springs 
are deep in the pain of life, but whose hidden 
wells have turned to sweetness and healing. It 
is not philosophically penetrative, but a tender, 
beautiful song warm with sincerity of feeling: 

Sweet is the time for joyous folk 

Of gifts and minstrelsy ; 
Yet I, O lowly-hearted One, 

Crave but Thy company. 
On lonesome road, beset with dread, 

My questing lies afar. 
I have no light, save in the east 

The gleaming of Thy star. 

In cloistered aisles they keep to-day 

Thy feast, O living Lord ! 
With pomp of banner, pride of song, 

And stately sounding word. 
Mute stand the kings of power and place, 

While priests of holy mind 
Dispense Thy blessed heritage 

Of peace to all mankind. 

I know a spot where budless twigs 

Are bare above the snow, 
And where sweet winter-loving birds 

Flit softly to and fro ; 



Alice Brown 247 

There with the sun for altar-fire, 

The earth for kneeling- place, 
The gentle air for chorister, 

Will I adore Thy face. 

Loud, underneath the great blue sky, 

My heart shall paean sing, 
The gold and myrrh of meekest love 

Mine only offering. 
Bliss of Thy birth shall quicken me ; 

And for Thy pain and dole 
Tears are but vain, so I will keep 

The silence of the soul. 

In glancing over The Road to Castaly, one 
notes many poems that might perhaps have 
represented it better than those chosen, such 
as " The Return," " The Unseen Fellowship," 
" Mariners," " Forewarned," and " Seaward 
Bound ; " but sufficient have been cited to 
show the quality of the volume and the sym- 
pathetic touch which Miss Brown possesses. 
Her nature poems range from the most exu- 
berant fancy to a Keats-like richness and ripe- 
ness of phrase ; and her miscellaneous verse 
from the tender, reverential note of the lyric 
last quoted to the trenchant scathing lines of 
" The Slanderer." It is, in brief, such work 
as combines feeling and distinction, and leaves 
one spiritually farther on his way than it found 
him. 




XIII 

RICHARD BURTON 

BOUT a decade ago there came from the 
press a demure little book clad soberly 
in Quaker garb, and hight gravely and 
mysteriously, Dumb hi yune. The title alone 
would have piqued one's curiosity as to the 
contents of the volume, but the name of the 
author, Richard Burton, was already known 
from magazine association with most of the 
songs in the newly published collection, and also 
as literary editor of the " Hartford Courant," 
whence his well-considered criticisms were 
coming to be quoted. 

There was, then, a circle of initiates into 
whose hands Dumb In June soon made its 
way, and quite as unerringly, in most cases, to 
their hearts, and certain of these will tell you 
that Dumb In June still represents him most 
adequately ; that it has a buoyancy and lyric 
joy such as less often distinguishes his later 
work ; and this point is well taken from the 
consideration of magnetic touch and disillu- 



Richard Burton 249 

sioned fancy; but is it quite reasonable to 
demand that " the earth and every common 
sight" shall continue to be "apparelled in celes- 
tial light " to the eyes of the poet when the years 
have brought the sober coloring to our own ? 
that Art shall be winged with the glory and 
the dream when Life's wings droop to the dust ? 
Would it be the truest art that should commu- 
nicate only this impulse ? Mr. Burton has not 
thought so: he has set himself to incorporate, 
in the life that he touches, the glory and the 
dream ; to lift the weight, if ever so little, from 
the laden wings, and he uses his gifts to that end. 
This is not an ideal that can embody itself 
in lightsome, dawn-fresh songs, as those that 
came, unsullied of pain, inviolate in hope, from 
out his nature-taught years ; but it is an ideal 
for which one should barter, if need be, the 
mere lyric joy of that earlier time. To divine 
the dumb emotion, the unexpectant desire, of 
the man of the streets, and to become his 
interpreter, is a nobler achievement than to 
catch in delicate fancies the airiest thoughts of 
Pan. The poet who remains merely the voice 
of the wood-god, or the voice of the mystic, or 
the voice of the scholar dreaming and aloof, 
may float a song over the treetops, but it will 
not be known at the hearth, which is the final 



250 The Younger American Poets 

test. Not to anticipate Mr. Burton's later 
ideal, however, let us return to Dumb In June 
and go with him upon the way of nature, 
unshadowed and elate. 

It is interesting to note, in studying the 
formative time of many poets, that nature is 
the first mistress of their vows, and a less capri- 
cious one than they shall find again ; hence 
their fealty to her and their ardor of surrender. 
Life has not yet come by, and paused to whis- 
per the one word that shall become the logos 
of the soul ; truth is still in the cosmos, the 
absolute, and one despairs of reducing it to the 
relative as he might of detaching a pencil of 
light from the rays of the sun. Nature alone 
represents the evolved intelligence, the har- 
mony, the soul of the cosmos, and its ideal 
made real in law; where, then, shall one begin 
his quest for truth more fittingly than at the 
gate of nature, where Beauty is the portress 
and Beauty is the guide ? 

Mr. Burton feels the vitality, the personality, 
of objects in the outer world. There is no such 
thing in his conception as inert matter; it is all 
pulsing with life and sensibility. To him May 
is a 

Sweet comer 
With the mood of a love-plighted lass, 



Richard Burton 251 

and henceforth we picture her as coming 
blithely by with flower-filled hands. This 
glimpsing of the May is from one of Mr. Bur- 
ton's later songs, "The Quest of Summer," — 
a poem full of color and atmosphere. After 
deploring the spring's withholding, it thrills 
to this note of exultation: 

But it came, 
In a garment of sensitive flame 
In the west, and a royal blue sky overhead, 
With exuberant breath and the bloom of all things 
Having wonders and wings, 
Being risen elate from the dead. 
Yea, it came with a flush 
Of pied flowers, and a turbulent rush 
Of spring-loosened waters, and an odorous hush 
At nightfall, — and then I was glad 
With the gladness of one who for militant months 
has been sad. 

The very breath of spring is in this ; one inhales 
it as he would a quickening aroma; it thrills 
him with the sensuous delight in the color, the 
perfume, the warmth, of the expanding air; and 
what delicate feeling for the atmospheric value 
of words is that which condenses a May twilight 
into "an odorous hush at nightfall." The 
words " odorous hush," in this connection, 
have drawn together by magnetic attraction ; 
substitute for them their apparent equivalents, 



252 The Younger American Poets 

"perfumed silence," ' c fragrant quiet," and the 
atmosphere has evaporated as breath from a 
glass ; but an " odorous hush " conveys the sense 
of that suspended hour of a spring twilight 
when day pauses as if hearkening, and silence 
falls palpably around, — that spiritual hour when 
the flowers offer up their evening sacrifice at 
the coming of the dew. 

Apropos of the feeling for words and their 
niceties of distinction as infusing what we term 
atmosphere into description, it may be said in 
passing that while Mr. Burton's sense of these 
values which is so keen in his prose does not 
always stand him in equal stead in his poetry, 
it is seldom lacking in his songs of nature. 

One may dip into the out-of-door verse at 
random and come away with a picture ; witness 
this " Meadow Fancy " : 

In the meadows yonder the winged wind 

Makes billows along the grain ; 
With their sequence swift they bring to mind 

The swash of the open main, 

Till I smell the pungent brine, and hear — 

Mine eyes grown dim — the cry 
Of the sailor lads, and feel vague fear 

Of the storm-wrack in the sky. 

While the metaphorical idea in these strophes 
is not new, they record with freehand strokes 



Richard Burton 253 

one of those suddenly suggestive moods that 
nature assumes, one of the swift similitudes 
she flashes before us as with conscious delight. 
Mr. Burton's nature-outlook is all open-air 
vision ; no office desk looms darkly behind 
it, as is sometimes the case in his other verse. 
It is the sort of inspiration that descends upon 
one when he is afoot with his vision, roam- 
ing afield with beauty. A leaf torn hastily 
from a notebook serves to catch the fleeting 
spell; magnetism tips the pencil; and ink and 
type, those dread non-conductors of impulse, 
cannot retard or neutralize its current. This 
is, in a word, the charm that rests upon the 
little volume, Dumb In June, in its various 
subjects. It would be idle to assert that it 
is as strong work as Mr. Burton has done ; 
but it is vivid and magnetic, and touched 
but lightly with the weltschmerz which life is 
sure to cast upon maturer work. There is 
pain, but it is merely artist-pain, in the ode 
that gives its name to the collection. 

Among the few love poems in Mr. Burton's 
first volume, " The Awakening " is one of the 
truest in feeling; " Values " one of the blithest 
and daintiest; "Still Days and Stormy," remi- 
niscent of Emily Dickinson in manner, one of 
the most delicate, catching in charming phrase 



254 The Younger American Poets 

one of the unanalyzed moods of love. The 
earlier volume has also a captivating poem 
in the lighter vein, that sings itself into the 
memory by its lilting rhythm and graceful 
rhyme-scheme, as well as by its subject. It 
is the story of Shakespeare's going a-wooing 
" Across the Fields to Anne " : 

How often in the summer-tide, 

His graver business set aside, 

Has stripling Will, the thoughtful-eyed, 

As to the pipe of Pan, 
Stepped blithesomely with lover's pride 

Across the fields to Anne. 

It must have been a merry mile, 

This summer stroll by hedge and stile, 

With sweet foreknowledge all the while 

How sure the pathway ran 
To dear delights of kiss and smile, 

Across the fields to Anne. 

The silly sheep that graze to-day, 

I wot, they let him go his way, 

Nor once looked up, as who should say : 

" It is a seemly man." 
For many lads went wooing aye 

Across the fields to Anne. 

The oaks, they have a wiser look ; 
Mayhap they whispered to the brook : 
" The world by him shall yet be shook, 

It is in nature's plan ; 
Though now he fleets like any rook 

Across the fields to Anne." 



Richard Burton 255 

And I am sure, that on some hour 
Coquetting soft 'twixt sun and shower, 
He stooped and broke a daisy-flower 

With heart of tiny span, 
And bore it as a lover's dower 

Across the fields to Anne. 

While from her cottage garden-bed 
She plucked a jasmine's goodlihede, 
To scent his jerkins brown instead ; 

Now since that love began, 
What luckier swain than he who sped 

Across the fields to Anne ? 

Dumb In June has many foregleams of the 
wider vision which distinguishes Mr. Burton's 
present work, as shown in his sonnet upon the 
Christ-head by Angelo, in " Day Laborers," 
and in that noble poem, " Mortis Dignitas," 
imbued with reverence and touched with the 
simplicity of the verities. It must be appraised 
with the best work of his pen, not only for its 
theme, but for the direct and unadorned word 
and measure so integral with the thought : 

Here lies a common man. His horny hands, 

Crossed meekly as a maid's upon his breast, 

Show marks of toil, and by his general dress 

You judge him to have been an artisan. 

Doubtless, could all his life be written out, 

The story would not thrill nor start a tear ; 

He worked, laughed, loved, and suffered in his time, 



256 The Younger American Poets 

And now rests peacefully, with upturned face 
Whose look belies all struggle in the past. 
A homely tale ; yet, trust me, I have seen 
The greatest of the earth go stately by, 
While shouting multitudes beset the way, 
With less of awe. The gap between a king 
And me, a nameless gazer in the crowd, 
Seemed not so wide as that which stretches now 
Betwixt us two, this dead one and myself. 
Untitled, dumb, and deedless, yet he is 
Transfigured by a touch from out the skies 
Until he wears, with all-unconscious grace, 
The strange and sudden Dignity of Death. 

This is a fitting transition to Lyrics of 
Brotherhood, which, together with his latest 
volume, presents the phase of Mr. Burton's 
work most representative of his feeling toward 
life. Any poet worthy of the name will come 
at last to a vision that only his eyes can see. 
Life will rise before him in a different sem- 
blance from that she presents to another; and 
if Beauty has lured him on, votary to that he 
might not wholly see, Life's yearning face wears 
no disguise, and, once having looked upon it 
with seeing eyes, it is an image not to be 
effaced. There are many who look and never 
see,- — the majority, perhaps. Their eyes are 
holden by the shapes that cross the inner 
sight, by hope and memory and their own 
ideal. They shall see only by one of those 



Richard Burton 257 

"flashes struck from midnight" of a personal 
tragedy — and often enough we gain our vision 
thus. 

There is a penetrative insight, that of the 
social economist, for example, that may possess 
no ray of sympathetic divination. It may probe 
to the heart of a condition, correlate causes and 
tendencies and divine effects, all from a scien- 
tific motive as professional as the practice of 
law, and as keen and cold. One may even be an 
avowed philanthropist and never come in sight 
of a human soul, as will the poet who looks upon 
the individual not as a case to be classified and 
tabulated, but as one walking step to step with 
him, though more heavily, whom he may reach 
out and touch now and then with the quicken- 
ing hand of sympathy, and whose load he may 
bear bewhiles on the journey. 

Such a poet is Mr. Burton, whose nature is 
shapen to one image with his fellows. To him 
literature is not an entity to be weighed only 
in the scales of beauty by the balances of Flau- 
bert ; it is to-day's and to-morrow's speech. In 
his prose, especially, this directness is marked; 
but in his poems one feels rather the inner re- 
lation with their spirit, for the magnetism of 
touch is less communicative than in the more 
flexible medium of prose. What is communi- 

17 



258 The Younger American Poets 

cative, however, is the feeling that Mr. Burton 
is living at the heart of things where the fusion 
is taking place that makes us one. Lyrics of 
Brotherhood'^ a genuine clasp of hand to hand, 
nor is he dismayed by the grime of the hand, 
for the primal unities are primal sanctities to 
him. Longing, strife, defeat, achievement, are 
all interpreted to him of personal emotion, sol- 
vent in personal sympathy. 

Lyrics of Brotherhood opens with a poem 
that redeems from odium one opprobrious 
symbol as old as time. It is that catch-penny 
epithet, " black sheep," that we bandy about 
with such flippancy, tossing it as loose change 
in a character appraisal and little recking what 
truth-valuation may lie behind it. It is good 
to feel that the impulse to redeem this symbol 
came to Mr. Burton and wrought so well within 
him, for " Black Sheep " is one of his truest in- 
spirations in feeling and expression : 

From their folded mates they wander far, 

Their ways seem harsh and wild ; 
They follow the beck of a baleful star, 

Their paths are dream-beguiled. 

Yet haply they sought but a wider range, 

Some loftier mOuntain-slope, 
And little recked of the country strange 

Beyond the gates of hope. 



Richard Burton 259 

And haply a bell with a luring call 

Summoned their feet to tread 
Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall 

And the lurking snare are spread. 

Maybe, in spite of their tameless days 

Of outcast liberty, 
They 're sick at heart for the homely ways 

Where their gathered brothers be. 

And oft at night, when the plains fall dark 

And the hills loom large and dim, 
For the Shepherd's voice they mutely hark, 

And their souls go out to him. 

Meanwhile, " Black sheep ! Black sheep ! " we cry, 

Safe in the inner fold ; 
And maybe they hear, and wonder why, 

And marvel, out in the cold. 

Throughout Mr. Burton's work there is a 
warm feeling for the simple tendernesses, the 
unblazoned heroisms of life ; the homely joys, 
the homely valors, the unknown consecrations, 
the unconfessed aspirations, — in a word, for 
all that songless melody of the common soul 
whose note we do not catch in the public clamor. 
There is a tendency, however, in his later work 
that, from an artistic standpoint, is carried too 
far, — the tendency to analogize. Everything in 
life presents an analogy to him who is alert for 
it ; and the habit of looking for analogies and 



260 The Younger American Poets 

symbols and making poems thereon grows upon 
one with the fatal facility of punning, upon a 
punster. A symbol, or the subtler and more 
profound analysis that seeks the causal relation 
of dissimilar things, which we term analogy, 
must have the magic of revelation ; it must flash 
upon the mind some similitude unthought or 
unguessed. Emerson is the past-master of this 
symbolistic magic ; they bring him rubies, and 
they become to him souls, of 

Friends to friends unknown : 
Tides that should warm each neighboring life 
Are locked in frozen stone. 

Here is the eye of the revelator, for who, look- 
ing upon rubies, would have seen in them what 
Emerson saw, and yet what a truth bides at 
the heart of this symbol ! 

Mr. Burton has several analogies, such as " On 
the Line," " North Light," and " Black Sheep," 
quoted above, that are excellently wrought ; 
indeed, it is not so much the manner in which 
the analogy is elaborated that one would crit- 
icise, as the frequently too-obvious nature 
of it. 

The danger to a poet in dropping too often 
into analogy is that he will become a singer 
of effects, a watcher of manifestations, and for- 



Richard Burton 261 

get to look for the gleam within himself and 
make it the light of his seeing. If poetry 
become too much a matter of observation, of 
report, vitality goes from it ; for imagination 
is stultified and emotion quenched, and poetry 
at its best is a union of imagination and emotion. 
Mr. Burton's poems in the main escape this 
indictment, but their danger lies along this line. 
His perception of identities is so acute, his 
sympathy so catholic, that not only is nothing 
human alien to him, but there is nothing in 
which he cannot find a theme for poetry. 
For illustration, there is an imaginative beauty 
in the symbol of the homing bird, but its artistic 
value is lost from over-use. Mr. Burton has 
some pleasing lines upon it, reaching in the final 
couplet a stronger tone, but from the nature of 
the case they cannot possess any fresh sugges- 
tion; on the contrary in such lines as "Nostal- 
gia," " In The Shadows," " The First Song," 
" If We Had The Time," though less poetic 
in theme, there is a personal note ; one feels 
back of them the great weariness, the futile 
yearning of life. Some of the elemental emo- 
tion is in them, the personal appeal that is 
so much Mr. Burton's note when he does not 
give himself too much to things without. Even 
though one use the visible event but as a sign 



262 The Younger American Poets 

of the spirit, as the objective husk of the subjec- 
tive truth, it is a vision which, if over-indulged, 
leads at length away from the living, the crea- 
tive passion within. One philosophizes, one 
contemplates, but the angel descends less often 
to trouble the waters within one's own being, 
and it is, after all, for this movement that one 
should chiefly watch. 

Message and Melody, Mr. Burton's latest col- 
lection, opens with perhaps his strongest and 
most representative poem, " The Song of the 
Unsuccessful." It is a poem provocative of 
thought, and upon which innumerable queries 
follow. Its opening lines utter a heresy 
against modern thinking ; our friends, the 
Christian Scientists and Mental Scientists and 
Spiritual Scientists, would at once cross swords 
with Mr. Burton and wage valiant conflict over 
the initial statement that God has " barred" from 
any one the "gifts that are good to hold." In- 
deed, the entire poem would come under their 
indictment for the same reason. But some- 
thing would be won from the conflict ; the stuff 
from which thought is made is in the poem. 
In the mean time let us have it before we 
consider it further. Here are the types mar- 
shalled before us; we recognize them all as 
they appear: 



Richard Burton 263 



We are the toilers from whom God barred 
The gifts that are good to hold. 

We meant full well, and we tried full hard, 
And our failures were manifold. 

And we are the clan of those whose kin 
Were a millstone dragging them down. 

Yea, we had to sweat for our brother's sin 
And lose the victor's crown. 

The seeming-able, who all but scored, 
From their teeming tribe we come : 

What was there wrong with us, O Lord, 
That our lives were dark and dumb? 

The men ten-talented, who still 

Strangely missed of the goal, 
Of them we are : it seems Thy will 

To harrow some in soul. 

We are the sinners, too, whose lust 

Conquered the higher claims ; 
We sat us prone in the common dust, 

And played at the devil's games. 

We are the hard-luck folk, who strove 

Zealously, but in vain : 
We lost and lost, while our comrades throve, 

And still we lost again. 

We are the doubles of those whose way 
Was festal with fruits and flowers ; 

Body and brain we were sound as they, 
But the prizes were not ours. 



264 The Younger American Poets 

A mighty army our full ranks make ; 

We shake the graves as we go ; 
The sudden stroke and the slow heartbreak, 

They both have brought us low. 

And while we are laying life's sword aside, 

Spent and dishonored and sad, 
Our epitaph this, when once we have died, 

" The weak lie here, and the bad." 

We wonder if this can be really the close, 
Life's fever cooled by death's trance ; 

And we cry, though it seem to our dearest of foes, 
" God give us another chance ! " 

The ease of the poem, the crisp Anglo- 
Saxon which it uses, the forthright stating of 
the case for the weaker side, and the humanity 
underlying it, are admirable ; and, further, from 
an artistic standpoint it is a stronger piece of 
work than it would have been had its philosophy 
chimed better with modern thinking. The un- 
successful are speaking ; their view-point and not 
necessarily the author's is presented. To have 
tacked on a clause additional, with a hint of the 
inner laws that govern success, might have 
saved the philosophy from impeachment as to 
falling back upon Providence ; but it would 
have been a decidedly false note put into the 
mouth of the unsuccessful. We may say at 
once that 



Richard Burton 265 

The men ten-talented who still 
Strangely missed of the goal, 

were the Amiels who suffered paralysis of the 
will to benumb them, rather than those whom 
it was the will of the Creator to " harrow in 
soul ; " but it would scarcely be expected of 
the Amiels themselves to analyze their defi- 
ciencies thus openly to the multitude. Impo- 
tence of will, however, is not at the root of all 
failure ; who can deny that there is 

The clan of those whose kin 

Were a millstone dragging them down ; 

that there are 

The hard-luck folk who strove 
Zealously, but in vain ; 
and 

The seeming-able, who all but scored, 

who put forth apparently more effort to score 
than did many of the victors, but who were 
waylaid by some invidious circumstance, or 
who failed to "grasp the skirts of happy 
chance " as the flying goddess passed them ? 

Mr. Burton's poem is too broad to discuss 
in the limits of a brief sketch ; it would 
furnish a text for the sociologist. All the 
complexities of modern conditions lie back of 
its plaint, which becomes an arraignment. One 



266 The Younger American Poets 

feels that if God be not within the shadow, he 
should at least have given Responsibility and 
Will surer means of keeping watch above their 
own. The O marie figure of the Wheel " busied 
with despite " rises before one as a symbol of 
this whirling strife where only the strong- 
est may cling, and where the swift revolving 
thing, having thrown the weakest off, makes of 
them a cushion for its turning; or, in Omar's 
phrase, " It speeds to grind upon the open 
wound." 

This is the apparent fact; but within it as 
axle to the Wheel is the law upon which it 
rotates, the law of individual choice. Each 
was given his supreme gift ; his word was 
whispered to him ; if he failed to hear it, or 
heed it, or express it in the predestined way, 
the flying Wheel casts him to the void, but the 
law is not impeached thereby. Outside this 
law, however, as spokes to the Wheel, are the 
innumerable radiations of human laws and con- 
ditions, so that one may scarcely obey the pri- 
mary command of his nature if he would, and 
often loses sight of it as the principle upon 
which his destiny is revolving. Mr. Burton's 
poem goes beyond the cold-blooded outlook 
upon the unsuccessful as merely those who 
are cast from the Wheel, and presents the 



Richard Burton 267 

truer view that they are by no means always 
the incompetents or degenerates : 

We are the doubles of those whose way 
Was festal with fruits and flowers ; 

Body and brain we were sound as they, 
But the prizes were not ours. 

Why? Let the sociologist or the psycholo- 
gist determine; in the mean time we have the 
quickened sympathy that follows upon the 
poem. 

Message and Melody has a group of songs 
turning upon some music theme ; of these 
" Second Fiddle " is the most notable. " In A 
Theatre " discloses a narrative vein and shows 
that Mr. Burton has a keen sense of the dra- 
matic in daily life. He has for some time been 
working upon a group of narrative poems with 
a prologue connecting them, which are soon to 
be issued, and which, judging from the fugitive 
examples in his other volumes, will disclose an 
interesting phase of his talent. 

To leave the impression of Mr. Burton's 
work that is most characteristic, — the impres- 
sion of its tenderness, its sympathy, its empha- 
sis upon the essential things, — one can scarcely 
do better than to summarize it in his own well- 
known lines, " The Human Touch " : 



268 The Younger American Poets 

High thoughts and noble in all lands 
Help me ; my soul is fed by such. 
But. ah, the touch of lips and hands, — 

The human touch ! 
Warm, vital, close, life's symbols dear, — 
These need I most, and now, and here. 



XIV 
CLINTON SCOLLARD 

THAT genial and delicate satirist, Miss 
Agnes Repplier, laments in one of her 
clever essays that our modern poets 
incline to dwell upon the sombre side of things, 
and hence contribute so little to the cheer of 
life. One cannot but wonder what poetry Miss 
Repplier has been reading, for our own acquaint- 
ance with the song of to-day has been so much 
the opposite that it is difficult on the spur of 
the moment to recall any poet of the present 
group in America whose work is not in the 
main wholesome and heartening and who is 
not facing toward the sun. To be sure, there 
must be the relief of shade, lest the light glare ; 
but they who journey to Castaly are in gen- 
eral cheerful wayfarers, taking gladly the gift of 
the hours and rendering the Giver a song, and 
among the blithest of them is Clinton Scollard, 
to whom life is always smilingly envisaged, and 
to whom, whether spring or autumn betide, it 
is still the " sweet o' the year." 



270 The Younger American Poets 

If Mr. Scollard's way has ever been " through 
dolor and dread, over crags and morasses," he 
is too much the optimist to let the fact be 
known, or, better still, to recognize it as such ; 
for we see what our own eyes reflect from 
within, and it is certain that Mr. Scollard's out- 
look upon life is governed by the inherent con- 
viction that her ways are ways of pleasantness 
and all her paths are peace. Possibly this 
conviction would have more value to the less 
assured nature if the testimony of its winning 
were set down as a strength-giving force by the 
way, as we incline in daily life to undervalue 
the amiability and cheer which are matters of 
birthright rather than of overcoming ; but this is 
a standard narrow in itself and wide of the issue 
at stake, which is so much cheer per se, whether 
the fortunate dower of nature, or the alchemic 
result of experience ; nor may one draw too 
definite a line between the temperamental gift 
and the spiritual acquisition, especially when 
the psychology of literature furnishes the only 
data. It is sufficient to note the result in the 
work, and its bearing upon the art which shapes 
it. To Mr. Scollard, then, " Life's enchanted 
cup " not only " sparkles at the brim ; " 'but 
when he lifts it to his lips a rainbow arches in 
its depths, and he has communicated to his 



Clinton Scollard 271 

song the flash of sunshine and color sparkling 
in the clearness of his own draught of life. 

Mr. Scollard is almost wholly an objective 
poet, and by method a painter. His palette is 
ever ready for the picture furnished him at 
every turn, and hence his several volumes 
relating to the Orient, Lutes of Morn, Lyrics 
of the Dawn, Songs oj Sunrise Lands, etc., 
are perhaps truer standards by which to meas- 
ure his work than any other, illustrating as they 
do the pictorial side of his talent. Every object 
in the Orient is a picture with its individual 
color and atmosphere, but Mr. Scollard does 
not merely offer us a sketch in color; the out- 
wardly picturesque is made to interpret a 
phase of life, and the spiritual contrasts in this 
land — where one religion or philosophy suc- 
ceeds another, bringing with it another civili- 
zation and leaving desolate the ancient shrines 
— are indicated with vivid phrase, as in these 
lines: 

A turbaned guard keeps stolid ward by the Zion gate in the 

sun, 
And the Paynim bows his shaven brows at the shrine of 

Solomon ; 
At the chosen altars, long, long quenched is the flame of 

the sacred fire, 
And the jackal has his haunt in the tomb of Hiram, King of 

Tyre. 



272 The Younger American Poets 

Great Herod's pride with its columned aisles is grown with 

the olive bough, 
And Gath and Dan are but crumbling piles, while Gaza is 

gateless now ; 
The sea on the sands of Ascalon sets hands to a mournful 

lyre, 
And the jackal has his haunt in the tomb of Hiram, King 

of Tyre. 

The closing stanza draws the contrast, or 
rather makes the spiritual application of the 
poem by which " the starry fame of one holy 
name " 

Has blazoned Bethlehem for aye the heart of the world's 

desire, 
While the jackal has his haunt in the tomb of Hiram, King 

of Tyre. 

The final line of these stanzas may offer a 
metrical stumbling-block until one catches the 
sweep of the rhythm and falls in note with the 
csesural pause after the word " tomb." Mr. 
Scollard is nothing if not lyrical, and it would 
be easier for the traditional camel to go 
through the eye of a needle than for a captious 
critic to discover a metrical falsity in his tune- 
ful song. 

But to return to the Orient, not alone the 
reverence for the Christian faith speaks in 
these poems, but the artistic beauty in the 
Moslem and other faiths has entered into 



Clinton Scollard 273 

them ; one is stirred to sympathetic devotion 
by these lines, — 

From many a marble minaret 
We heard the rapt muezzin's call ; 
And to the prayerful cries my guide, 
During each trembling interval, 
With reverence serene replied, — 

and finds throughout the poems the higher 
assurance that 

The East and West are one in Allah's grace : 
Which way so'er ye turn, behold — His face ! 

It is difficult to choose from the several vol- 
umes portraying Oriental life, such poems as 
shall best represent it, since in any direction 
we shall find a picture full of color and of 
strange new charm : the white mosques and 
minarets ; the gardens of citron and pome- 
granate ; the bazaars, with their rare fabrics and 
curios ; the pilgrims, dozing in the shade of 
the temples; the Bedouins, riding in from the 
desert; the women carrying from the springs 
their water-jars. We shall hear the sunrise 
cry of the muezzin from the minarets ; the 
zither and lute in the gardens at evening; the 
jargon of tongues in booth and market-place ; 
the philosopher expounding the Koran ; the 

lover singing the songs of Araby. The dra- 

18 



274 The Younger American Poets 

matic life of that impulsive, passionate people 
will be seen in such poems as the " Dancing 
of Suleima," " At the Tomb of Abel," and 
" Yousef and Melhem," and the philosophical 
side in many a poem translating the precepts 
of the Koran into action ; but it is, after all, 
for the picture in which all this is set that one 
comes with chief pleasure to these songs. Not 
only the human element of that strangely fas- 
cinating life is incorporated in them, but all 
the phenomena of nature in its swift-changing 
moods pass in review before one's eyes, par- 
ticularly of the swift transitions of the desert 
sun, stayed by no detaining cloud, and followed 
by the immediate gloom of night. The graphic 
lines — 

When on the desert's rim, 

In sudden, awful splendor, stood the sun — 

are excelled in terse, pictorial force by the 
record of its setting, — 

Then sudden dipped the sun. — 

Nor easily forgotten are those pictures of 

lying in the open when the cooling dark had 

fallen upon the yearning land, or upon the hills 

when 

The night hung over Hebron all her stars, 
Miraculous processional of flame, 



Clinton Scollard 275 

and below from out the " purple blur" rose the 
minarets of the mosque where 

Sepulchred for centuries untold, 

The bones of Isaac and of Joseph lay ; 
And broidered cloths of silver and of gold 

Were heaped and draped o'er Abraham's crumbled clay. 

In The Lutes of Morn there are two sonnets 
— though lyrics in effect, so does the song 
prevail with Mr. Scollard — that serve hastily 
to sketch a moving scene and in their touch 
bring to mind Paul the chronicler. The first 
is "Passing Rhodes," and contains these lines 
with a biblical tang, 

At day's dim marge, hard on the shut of eve, 
We rocked abreast the rugged Rhodian isle, 

which tang appears in stronger flavor in the 
racy opening of the following : 

Cleaving the seadrift through the starlit night, 
We left the barren Patmian isle behind, 
And scudding northward with a favoring wind, 
Lay anigh Chios at the dawn of light. 
The shore, the tree-set slopes, the rugged height, 
Clear in the morning's roseate air outlined, — 
This was his birthplace who, albeit blind, 
Saw tall Troy's fall, and sang the tragic sight. 
Resting within the roadstead, while the day 
Grew into gradual glory, on the ear 

Continuous broke the surge-song of the brine ; 



276 The Younger American Poets 

And as we marked it rise, or die away 

To rise again, it seemed that we could hear 
The swell and sweep of Homer's mighty line. 

Mr. Scollard's musical and finely descriptive 
poem, " As I Came Down From Lebanon," 
has become a favorite with the readers of his 
verse ; but while it has great charm, it is not as 
strong a piece of work as are many other of 
the Oriental poems, contained in his later 
volumes, The Lutes of Mom and Lyrics of the 
Dawn, nor as that realistic poem, " Khamsin," 
which appeared in the same collection. Here 
indeed is the breath of the sirocco : 

Oh, the wind from the desert blew in ! 

Khamsin, 
The wind from the desert blew in ! 
It blew from the heart of the fiery south, 
From the fervid sand and the hills of drouth, 
And it kissed the land with its scorching mouth ; 
The wind from the desert blew in ! 



It blasted the buds on the almond bough, 
And shrivelled the fruit on the orange-tree ; 
The wizened dervish breathed no vow, 
So weary and parched was he. 
The lean muezzin could not cry; 
The dogs ran mad, and bayed the sky ; 
The hot sun shone like a copper disk, 
And prone in the shade of an obelisk 



Clinton Scollard 277 

The water-carrier sank with a sigh, 
For limp and dry was his water-skin ; 
And the wind from the desert blew in. 



Into the cool of the mosque it crept, 

Where the poor sought rest at the prophet's shrine ; 

Its breath was fire to the jasmine vine ; 

It fevered the brow of the maid who slept, 

And men grew haggard with revel of wine. 

The tiny fledglings died in the nest ; 

The sick babe gasped at the mother's breast. 

Then a rumor rose and swelled and spread 

From a tremulous whisper, faint and vague, 

Till it burst in a terrible cry of dread, 

The plague / the plague / the plague ! — 

Oh the wind, Khamsin, 
The scourge from the desert blew in ! 

Of the lighter notes, upon love and kindred 
themes, Mr. Scollard has many in his poems 
of the Orient ; " The Song of the Nargileh " is 
of especial charm, but unfortunately too long to 
quote. Very graceful, too, is the " Twilight 
Song " with one of Mr. Scollard's graphic be- 
ginnings, but one quaint bit from The Lutes 
of Morn is so characteristic as showing Ori- 
ental felicity of speech that while merely a 
jotting in song, and less important in an artis- 
tic sense than many others touching upon the 
theme of love, I cannot refrain from citing it 
instead : it is called " Greetings — Cairo," 



278 The Younger American Poets 

Upon El Muski did I meet Hassan, 

Beneath arched brows his deep eyes twinkling bright, 
Good dragoman (and eke good Mussulman) 

And cried unto him, " May your day be white ! " 

" And yours, howadji ! " came his swift reply, 

A smile illumining the words thereof, 
(All men are poets 'neath that kindling sky), 

" As white as are the thoughts of her you love ! " 

The Oriental poems cover not only a varied 
range of subject, but pass in review nearly 
every important city and shrine in the length 
and breadth of that storied land, making poeti- 
cal footnotes to one's history and filling his 
memory with pictures. 

The second source of Mr. Scollard's inspira- 
tion, doubtless the first in point of time, is his 
delight in nature. Here, too, the objective side 
predominates. He is footfaring, with every 
sense alert to see, to hear, and to enjoy ; he slips 
the world of men as a leash and becomes the fet- 
terless comrade of the vagrant things of earth. 
He stops to do no philosophizing by the way, — 
the analogies, the laws, the evolving purposes 
of nature, are rarely touched upon in his verse ; 
nor is he one of the poet-naturalists, intent to 
observe and record with infinite fidelity the 
fact, with its mystic spirit of beauty. He finds 
in the obvious side of nature such glamour and 



Clinton Scollard 279 

magic as suffice for inspiration and delight; 
and it is this side which enthralls him almost 
wholly. In other words, his nature vision is 
rather outlook than insight, though always 
sympathetic in fancy and delicate in touch. 
He seems to see only the gladness in the 
season's phases, and greets white-shrouded 
winter with all the ardor that he would bestow 
upon flower-decked June. 

He has one volume entitled Footfarings, 
written partly in prose and partly in verse, — a 
book abrim with morning joy, and bringing with 
it the aroma of wood-flowers and the minstrelsy 
of birds. The prose predominates, and is worthy 
the pen of a poet: its imaginative grace, its 
enthusiasm, and its quaint and delicate fancy 
impart to it all the flavor of poetry while ad- 
hering to a crisp and racy style. Each chapter 
is prefaced by a keynote of verse, such as that 
which conducts one to the haunt of the trillium, 
where 

These nun-like flowers with spotless urns, 
That shine with such a snowy gloss, 

Will seem, amid the suppliant ferns, 
To bow above the cloistral moss. 

Then Hope, her starry eyes upraised, 

Will suddenly surprise you there, 
And you will feel that you have gazed 

On the white sanctity of prayer ! 



280 The Younger American Poets 

Were it within the province of this study, I 
should like to quote some of Mr. Scollard's 
prose from a " Woodland Walk," " A Search 
for the Lady's Slipper," or many another pic- 
turesque chapter. One loses thought of print, 
and is for the nonce following his errant fancy 
through meadow and coppice to the heart of 
the spicy fir-woods, picking his way over the 
forest brooks, from stone to stone ; following 
the alluring skid-roads, latticed by new growths 
on either side and arched above by interlacing 
green; penetrating into the tamarack thickets 
at the lure of the hermit-thrush, that spirit- 
voice of song; resting on a springy bed of 
moss and fern, — becoming, in short, wayfellow 
of desire, and thrall but to his will. Mr. Scol- 
lard has also published within the past year a 
book of nature verse called The Lyric Bough, 
which contains some of his best work in this 
way ; one of its livelier fancies is that of " The 
Wind " : 



O the wind is a faun in the spring-time 

When the ways are green for the tread of the May ; 
List ! hark his lay ! 
Whist ! mark his play ! 

T-r-r-r-1 ! 
Hear how gay ! 



Clinton Scollard 281 

O the wind is a dove in the summer 

When the ways are bright with the wash of the moon ; 
List ! hark him tune ! 
Whist ! mark him swoon ! 

C-o-o-o-o ! 
Hear him croon ! 

O the wind is a gnome in the autumn 

When the ways are brown with the leaf and burr ; 
Hist ! mark him stir ! 
List ! hark him whir ! 

S-s-s-s-t ! 
Hear him chirr ! 

O the wind is a wolf in the winter 

When the ways are white for the horned owl ; 
Hist ! mark him prowl ! 
List ! hark him howl ! 

G-r-r-r-1 ! 
Hear him growl ! 

One of the earlier books, The Hills of Song, 
contained a brief, merry-toned lyric, with a cava- 
lier note, that sung itself into the American 
Anthology, and is perhaps as characteristic and 
charming a leave-taking of this phase of Mr. 
Scollard's work as one may cite : 

Be ye in love with April-tide ? 
I' faith, in love am I ! 
For now \ is sun, and now ? t is shower, 
And now 't is frost, and now J t is flower, 
And now 7 t is Laura laughing-eyed, 
And now 't is Laura shy. 



282 The Younger American Poets 

Ye doubtful days, O slower glide ! 
Still smile and frown, O sky ! 
Some beauty unforeseen I trace 
In every change of Laura's face ; — 
Be ye in love with April-tide ? 
F faith, in love am I ! 

Balladry furnishes the third source of Mr. 
Scollard's singing impulse. The Oriental 
poems have somewhat of this phase of his work, 
though more especially inclining to the narra- 
tive style ; and the epic poem " Skenandoa," 
while written in a story-lyric, shows the ballad- 
making qualities, which in their true note had 
been heard earlier in " Taillefer the Trouvere," 
and have been heard more definitely in Ballads 
of Valor and Victory, recently written in col- 
laboration with Mr. Wallace Rice, and reciting 
the heroisms and adventures of soldier, sailor, 
and explorer from Drake to Dewey. 

Ballad-writing is an art calling for dis- 
tinct gifts. The dramatic element must pre- 
dominate. The story first — and if this be 
colorless, there is no true ballad ; the verse 
next — and if this be flaccid, or if it swing to 
the other extreme and become too strained and 
tense, there is no true ballad ; for the essence 
of ballad-writing is in the freedom of the move- 
ment, the swing and verve with which one 



Clinton Scollard 283 

recounts a picturesque story. Mr. Scollard's 
contributions to the volume are sung with spon- 
taneity and with a virile note, and in the mat- 
ter of characterization, fixing the personality of 
the hero before the mind, the work is especially 
strong ; witness " Riding With Kilpatrick ; " 
" Wayne at Stony Point ; " " Montgomery at 
Quebec ; " the picture of Thomas Macdonough 
at the Battle of Plattsburg Bay, or in more 
recent times of " Private Blair of the Regulars," 
the modern Sidney, who, dying, gave the last 
draught of his canteen to his wounded fellows. 
"The White November" and "The Eve of 
Bunker Hill " are among the best of the ballads. 
The former brings with it a well-known note, 
but one newly bedight with brave phrase ; in- 
deed, all the celebrated ballad measures appear 
in these song stories, but well individualized in 
diction and dramatic mood. They differ of 
course in the degree of these qualities ; some 
have too slight an incident to chronicle ; some 
might with better effect have been omitted, 
particularly " War in April," by Mr. Rice ; 
but for this he atones by " The Minute-Men 
of Northboro " and other vigorous contribu- 
tions to the collection. The ballads have the 
merit of structural compactness. While the 
necessary portrayal of the incident renders 



284 The Younger American Poets 

many of the best of them too long to quote, 
there are, in Mr. Scollard's contribution to 
the book, few superfluous stanzas ; each plays 
its essential part in the development of the 
story. They may not, then, be quoted without 
their full complement of strophes, which debars 
us from citing the " White November," " Wayne 
at Stony Point," and others mentioned as most 
representative ; but here is the tale of " Riding 
With Kilpatrick," not more valiant than many 
of the others, but celebrating a picturesque 
figure. There are certain reminiscent notes of 
" How They Brought the Good News from 
Ghent to Aix " in this galloping anapestic meas- 
ure ; and its graphic opening line calls to mind 
that instantaneous picture, " At Aershot, up 
leaped of a sudden the sun." 

Dawn peered through the pines as we dashed at the ford ; 
Afar the grim guns of the infantry roared; 
There were miles yet of dangerous pathway to pass, 
And Moseby might menace, and Stuart might mass ; 
But we mocked every doubt, laughing danger to scorn, 
As we quaffed with a shout from the wine of the morn 
Those who rode with Kilpatrick to valor were born ! 

How we chafed at delay ! How we itched to be on ! 
How we yearned for the fray where the battle-reek shone ! 
It was forward, not halt, stirreS the fire in our veins, 
When our horses' feet beat to the clink of the reins ; 



Clinton Scollard 285 

It was charge, not retreat, we were wonted to hear ; 
It was charge, not retreat, that was sweet to the ear; 
Those who rode with Kilpatrick had never felt fear ! 

At last the word came, and troop tossed it to troop ; 

Two squadrons deployed with a falcon-like swoop ; 

While swiftly the others in echelons formed, 

For there, just ahead, was the line to be stormed. 

The trumpets rang out ; there were guidons ablow ; 

The white summer sun set our sabres aglow ; 

Those who rode with Kilpatrick charged straight at the foe ! 

We swept like the whirlwind ; we closed ; at the shock 
The sky seemed to reel and the earth seemed to rock ; 
Steel clashed upon steel with a deafening sound, 
While a redder than rose-stain encrimsoned the ground* 
If we gave back a space from the fierce pit of hell, 
We were rallied again by a voice like a bell, 
Those who rode with Kilpatrick rode valiantly well ! 

Rang sternly his orders from out of the wrack : 

Re-form there, New Yorkers ! You, Harris Light, back ! 

Come o?i, men of Mai?ie ! we will C07iquer or fall ! 

Now, forward, boys, forward, and follow me, all ! 

A Bayard in boldness, a Sidney in grace, 

A lion to lead, and a stag-hound to chase — 

Those who rode with Kilpatrick looked Death in the face ! 

Though brave were our foemen, they faltered and fled ; 
Yet that was no marvel when such as he led ! 
Long ago, long ago, was that desperate day ! 
Long ago, long ago, strove the Blue and the Gray ! 
Praise God that the red sun of battle is set ! 
That our hand-clasp is loyal and loving — and yet 
Those who rode with Kilpatrick can never forget ! 



286 The Younger American Poets 

The Lochinvar key is also struck in the de- 
scription of Kilpatrick. Mr. Scollard sounds 
a less sanguinary note in most of the ballads, 
as that of " The Troopers " or " King Philip's 
Last Stand." 

" On the Eve of Bunker Hill," while record- 
ing no thrilling story, has a note of pensive 
beauty in its quiet description of the prepara- 
tion for battle before that memorable day, and 
of the prayer offered in the presence of the 
soldiers, " ranged a-row " in the open night. 
The initial stanza gives the setting and key : 

? T was June on the face of the earth, June with the rose's 

breath, 
When life is a gladsome thing, and a distant dream is death ; 
There was gossip of birds in the air, and the lowing of herds 

by the wood, 
And a sunset gleam in the sky that the heart of a man holds 

good; 
Then the nun-like twilight came, violet-vestured and still, 
And the night's first star outshone afar on the eve of Bunker 

Hill. 

Taking the volume throughout, it is a stir- 
ringly sung resume of all the chief deeds in 
American history to which attach valor and 
romance, and is not only attractive reading, but 
should be in the hands of every lad as a stimu- 
lus to patriotism, and to focus in his mind, as 



Clinton Scollard 287 

textbooks could never do, the exploits of the 
brave and the strong. 

In the lyrical narrative poem, such as 
" Guiraut, the Troubadour," Mr. Scollard has 
one of his most characteristic vehicles. The 
adventures of the singer who sought a maid in 
Carcassonne are, no doubt, romantically en- 
hanced by association of the name with that 
of the hapless one who " had not been to Car- 
cassonne ; " but it is certain that one follows 
the troubadour in his " russet raimentry," drawn 
by his charm as 

Unto the gate of Carcassonne 

(Ah, how his blithe lips smiled upon 

The warded gate of Carcassonne !) 

As light of foot as Love he strode ; 

The budding flowers along the road 
Bloomed sudden, with his song for lure ; 

And softlier the river flowed 
Before Guiraut, the troubadour. 

Unto a keep in Carcassonne 
(No sweeter voice e'er drifted on 
That frowning keep in Carcassonne !) 
Anon the singer drew anigh, — 

but we may not follow his propitious fortunes, 
glimpsed but to show the manner of their tell- 
ing. The parenthetical lines, recurring in each 
stanza, impart a peculiar charm to the recital, 



288 The Younger American Poets 

but the diction and phrasing, while pleasant 
and in harmony, have no especial distinction 
in themselves, and this illustrates a frequent 
characteristic of Mr. Scollard's work that the 
melody often carries the charm rather than the 
expression or basic theme. He is primarily a 
singer, he has the " lute in tune/' and the song 
is so spontaneous as sometimes to outsing 
the motive. There is always a felicitous, and 
often unique, turn of phrase and a most imag- 
inative fancy, but one feels in a good deal of 
the work a lack of acid ; it is too bland to bite as 
deeply as it ought. Just a bit sharper tang is 
needful. 

The message should also inform more vitally 
the melody, wedding more subtly the outer and 
inner grace. A poet is a teacher, whether he 
will or no, and the heart should be the vital text- 
book of his expounding. It is because of their 
deeper rooting in life, though a life foreign to us, 
that the Oriental poems of Mr. Scollard have 
often greater vitality than the Occidental ones, 
whose inspiration is found chiefly in nature. 
His ballads show that he has a sympathetic 
insight into character and a knowledge of 
human motive that would, if infused more 
widely through his work, give to it a warmth 
of personal appeal and a subjectivity which in 



Clinton Scollard 289 

many of its phases it now lacks. The golden 
thread of Joy is woven so constantly into 
the web of his song that those whose woof is 
crossed with the hempen thread of Pain are 
likely to feel that he has no word for them, no 
hint as to the subtle transformation by which 
the hempen thread may merge into the gold, 
when the finished fabric hurtles from the 
loom. In other words, Mr. Scollard 's work 
is too objective to carry with it the spiritual 
meaning that it would if ingrained more 
deeply in the hidden life of the soul. Along 
this line lies its finer development : not that 
it shall lose a jot of its cheer, but that it shall 
constantly inform it with a richer and deeper 
meaning. 



19 



XV 
MARY MCNEIL FENOLLOSA 

TO be a poet of the East, one must be 
a painter, using words as a colorist uses 
pigment. His poem must be a pic- 
ture wherein form and detail are subjected to 
the values of tone and atmosphere ; like the 
dawn-crest of Fujiyama it must glow, it must 
dazzle with tints and light. To convert the 
pen into an artist's brush, the vocabulary into 
a palette, is an end not to be gained by striving ; 
it is a talent a priori^ a temperamental color, a 
temperamental art. 

So vividly is this shown in the work of Mrs. 
Mary McNeil Fenollosa that whereas in her 
Eastern poems she is every whit the artist, in 
her Western, her Occidental poems, she is with- 
out special distinction. Certain of her Western 
poems have a conventional, mechanical tone, 
while those of the East are abrim with vitality 
and impulse. They were not " reared by wan 
degrees ; " the craftsman did not fashion them ; 
and although varying in charm, there are few 
that lack the Eastern spirit. 



Mary McNeil Fenollosa 291 

Mrs. Fenollosa's bit of the Orient is Japan, 
where nature is ever coquetting, — laughing in 
the cherry, sighing in the lotos. Nature in the 
Orient is invested with a personality foreign to 
Western countries, a personality reminiscent of 
the gods. Then, too, nature is given a more 
prominent place in the poetry of the East than 
is love, or any of the subjects, so infinite in 
variety, which engross a Western singer; and 
it happens that Mrs. Fenollosa, catching this 
spirit during her life in Japan, gives us chiefly 
nature poems in her Eastern collection. W 7 ith 
artist-strokes where each is sure, she flashes 
this picture before us : 

The day unfolds like a lotos-bloom, 
Pink at the tip, and gold at the core, 

Rising up swiftly through waters of gloom 
That lave night's shore ; 

or this vision of — 

The cloud-like curve, 

The loosened sheaf, 

The ineffable pink of a lotos leaf. 

One great charm of the imagery in Mrs. 
Fenollosa's Japanese poems is its subtlety of 
suggestion. The imagination has play; some- 
thing is left for the fancy of the reader, which 
can scarcely be said of some of the highly 



292 The Younger American Poets 

wrought verse of our own country. The 
first lyric in the collection hints of a score 
of things beyond its eight-line scope: 

O let me die a singing ! 

O let me drown in light ! 
Another day is winging 

Out from the nest of night. 
The morning glory's velvet eye 

Brims with a jewelled bead. 
To-day my soul 's a dragon-fly, 

The world a swaying reed ! 

"To-day my soul's a dragon-fly," — a winged 
incarnation of liberty and joy; "the world a 
swaying reed," — a pliant thing made for my 
delight, an empery of which I am the sovereign 
and may have my will. 

But these Japanese songs have not wholly 
the lighter melody; there are those that sing of 
the devastation of the rice-fields after the floods, 
a grim and tragic picture ; and there are inter- 
pretations of the dreams of the great bronze 
Buddha, looking with sad, inscrutable eyes 
upon the pilgrims who, with the recurrent 
seasons, come creeping to his feet like insects 
from the mould; and there is a story of "The 
Path of Prayer," — a Japanese superstition so 
human that one is glad of a religion where 
sentiment overtops reason. It pictures one 



Mary McNeil Fenollosa 293 

walking at evening under gnarled old pines 
until he chances upon a hidden path leading 
through a hundred gates that keep a sacred 
way ; and as he passes he is amazed to see 
along the route, springing as if from the earth, 
fluttering white papers, tied 

As banners pendent from a mimic wand. 

The poem continues: 

I wondered long ; when, from the drowsy wood, 
A whisper reached me, " J Tis the Path of Prayer, 
Where, nightly, Kwannon walks in pitying mood, 
To read the sad petitions planted there." 

Ah. simple faith ! The sun was in the west ; 
And darkness smote with flails his quivering light. 
Beside the path I knelt ; and, with the rest, 
My alien prayer was planted in the night. 

It is to be regretted that Mrs. Fenollosa 
gives us so little of the religious or mystical 
in Japanese thought, since no country is richer 
in material of the sort, and especially as the 
isolated poems and passages in which she 
touches upon it are all so interpretative. She 
has one poem, a petition of old people at a 
temple, that strikes deep root both in pathos 
and philosophy. Perhaps the Japanese excel 
all other peoples in the reverence paid to age, 
and yet no excess of consideration can sup- 



294 The Younger American Poets 

plant the melancholy of that time. The sec- 
ond stanza of Mrs. Fenollosa's poem expresses 
the aloofness of the old, — 

For thy comfort, Lord, we pray, 

Namu Amida Butsu ! 
In the rice-fields, day by day, 
Now the strong ones comb the grain ; 
Once we laughed there in the rain, 
Stooping low in sun and cold 
For our helpless young and old ; 
In the rice-fields day by day, 

Namu Amida Butsu ! 

And the last stanza is imbued with the 
Buddhistic resignation, the desire to pass, to 
be reabsorbed, reinvested, reborn. It is philo- 
sophical after the Karmic law, and beautiful in 
spirit even to a Western mind: 

For thy mercy, Lord, we pray, 

Namu Amida Butsu ! 
Let the old roots waste away, 
That the green may pierce the light ! 
Life and thought, in withered plight, 
Choke the morning. Far beneath 
Stirs the young blade in its sheath. 
Let the old roots pass away ! 

Namu Amida Butsu ! 

This is symbolism which upon a cursory 
reading one might lose entirely, thinking its 
import to be, let the old die and give place 



Mary McNeil Fenollosa 295 

to the young; whereas it is, let the old in 
oneself, the outworn, the material, the ineffica- 
cious, die, and give place to the new. 

That the green may pierce the light : — 

that out of physical decay a regrowth of the 
spirit may spring; for already, 

Far beneath 
Stirs the young blade in its sheath : — 

the soul is quickening for the upper air and 
making ready to burst its detaining mould. 
How beautiful is the recognition that 

Life and thought, in withered plight, 
Choke the morning, 

the young eternal self, that, having fulfilled the 
conditions of Karma in its present embodiment 
of destiny, is obeying the resistless law that calls 
it to new modes of being. It is unnecessary to 
be of the Buddhistic faith to feel the spell and 
the beauty of its philosophy. 

Mrs. Fenollosa's gift is chiefly lyrical, although 
her sonnets and descriptive poems have many 
passages of beauty ; the picturesque in fancy 
and phrasing is ever at her command, and 
there are few poems in which one is not 



296 The Younger American Poets 

arrested by some unique expression, or bit 
of imagery, as this from " An Eastern Cry " : 

Beneath the maples crickets wake, 
And chip the silejice, flake on flake. 

Or that in which the rain 

Brimmed great magnolias up with scented wine. 
Or the fir-tree stood, 

With clotted plumage sagging to the land. 
Or when Fujiyama seen at dawn is pictured as 

A crown .... self poised in mist, 
and again as 

A frail mirage of Paradise 
Set in the quickening air. 

So true in color and vision are Mrs. Fenol- 
losa's lyrics that one cannot understand how 
in a sonnet she can be guilty of so mixed 
a metaphor as this describing a " Morning On 
Fujisan " : 

Through powdered mist of dawn-lit pearl and rose 
There lifts one lotos-peak of cleaving white, 
The swan-like rhapsody of dying night, 

Which, softly soaring through the ether, blows 
To hang there breathless. . . . 



Mary McNeil Fenollosa 297 

The first two lines are unimpeachable, but 
when the "lotos-peak" is amplified into a 
" swan-like rhapsody," one is swept quite 
away from his bearings. It is but an illus- 
tration of the effort that often goes to the 
building of a sonnet and renders forced and 
inept what was designed to be artistic. Mrs. 
Fenollosa's sonnets, however, do not often 
violate congruity, for while the sonnet is by 
no means her representative form, she handles 
it with as much ease as do most of the modern 
singers, and occasionally one comes upon her 
most characteristic lines in this compass; but 
it is true of the sonnet form in general, except 
in the hands of a thorough artist, that the 
mechanism is too obvious and obscures the 
theme. 

To know Mrs. Fenollosa at her best one 
must read " Miyoko San," " Full Moon Over 
Sumidagawa," "An Eastern Cry," "Exiled," 
and this song " To a Japanese Nightingale," 
full of mystic, wistful beauty, of suggestive 
spiritual grace. How delicate is its fashion- 
ing, and yet how it defines a picture, silhou- 
ettes it against the Orient night! 

Dark on the face of a low, full moon 
Swayeth the tall bamboo. 



298 The Younger American Poets 

No flute nor quiver of song is heard, 
Though sheer on the tip a small brown bird 
Sways to an inward tune. 

O small brown bird, like a dusky star, 

Lone on the tall bamboo, 
Thou germ of the soul of a summer night, 
Thou quickening core of a lost delight, 
Of ecstasy born afar, 

Soar out thy bliss to the tingling air, 

Sing from the tall bamboo ! 
Loosen the long, clear, syrup note 
That shimmers and throbs in thy delicate throat ; 
Mellow my soul's despair ! 






XVI 

RIDGELY TORRENCE 

MR. RIDGELY TORRENCE, whose 
poetic drama, El Dorado, brought 
him generous recognition, gave earlier 
hostages to fame in the shape of a small volume 
with the caption, The House of a Hundred 
Lights, and gravely subtitled, " A Psalm of 
Experience after Reading a Couplet of Bidpai." 
Into this little book were packed some 
charming whimsicalities, together with some 
graver thoughts — though not too grave — and 
some fancies full tender. It had, however, 
sufficient resemblance to Omar Khayyam to 
bring it under a Philistine indictment, though 
its point of view was in reality very different. 
It was a clever bit of ruminating upon the 
Where and How and Why and Whence, with- 
out attempting to arrive at these mysteries, but 
rather to laugh at those who did. Mr. Tor- 
rence is so artistic as to know that only the 
masters may go upon the road in search of the 
Secret, and that the average wayfarer may not 



300 The Younger American Poets 

hope to overtake it, but rather to suggest it by 
a hint now and then. The philosophy of The 
House of a Hundred Lights is in the main of 
the jocular sort; and Bidpai of indefinite 
memory may well chuckle to himself in some 
remote celestial corner that any couplet of his 
should have been so potent as to produce it. 

Mr. Torrence has not, that I can see, filched 
the fire from Omar's altar to kindle his hun- 
dred lights; this, for illustration, is pure whim- 
sicality, not fatalistic philosophy, as a similar 
thought would be in Omar : 

" Doubt everything," the Thinker said, 

When I was parch'd with Reason's drought. 
Said he, " Trust me, I 've probed these things ; 
Have utter faith in me, — and doubt ! n 

Though the sky reel and Day dissolve, 
And though a myriad suns fade out, 

One thing of earth seems permanent 
And founded on Belief : 't is — Doubt. 

But best of all is that quatrain in which he 
exonerates Providence : 

What ! doubt the Master Workman's hand 

Because my fleshly ills increase ? 
No ; for there still remains one chance 

That I am not His Masterpiece. 

If a cleverer bit of humor than that has been 
put into four lines, I have not seen it, nor a 



Ridgely Torrence 301 

more delightful epitome than this of the incon- 
sistent moralizing of youth : 

Yet what have I to do with sweets 

Like Love, or Wine, or Fame's dear curse ? 

For I can do without all things 
Except — except the universe. 

Mr. Torrence's quatrains penetrate into the 
nebulous dreams of youth, or rather, interpret 
them, since The House of a Hundred Lights 
was reared in that charmed air, and carry 
one through the realm of rainbows to the 
land of the gray light, to which every pil- 
grim comes anon. Love receives its toll, the 
costliest and most precious as youth fares on ; 
and Mr. Torrence proves himself a poet in his 
picture of this tribute-giving at the road-house 
of Love. Not only the visioning, but the 
lucidity of the words, and their soft conso- 
nance, prove him sensitive to the values of 
cadence and simplicity: 

Last night I heard a wanton girl 

Call softly down unto her lover, 
Or call at least unto the shade 

Of Cypress where she knew he 'd hover. 

Said she, " Come forth, my Perfect One ; 

The old bugs sleep and take their ease ; 
We shall have honey overmuch 

Without the buzzing of the bees." 



302 The Younger American Poets 

Ah, Foolish Ones, I heard your vows 

And whispers underneath the tree. 
Her father is more wakeful than 

She ever dreamed, for I — was he. 

I saw them kissing in the shade 

And knew the sum of all my lore : 
God gave them Youth, God gave them Love, 

And even God can give no more. 

But much more delicate is this quatrain which 
follows the last, and traces the unfolding of a 
young girl's nature in the years that shape the 
dream. It is a bit of genuine artistry : 

At first, she loved nought else but flowers, 
And then — she only loved the Rose ; 

And then — herself alone ; and then — 
She knew not what, but now — she knows. 

This is a deftly fashioned lyric, rather than 
a stanza conjoined to others, though, for 
that matter, the thread of conjunction in the 
poem is slight; almost any of the quatrains 
might be detached without loss of value save 
in atmosphere, as they are arranged with a 
certain logical view and grow a bit more 
serious as they progress. We spoke, for in- 
stance, of the path of youth leading to the 
grayer light, and incidentally that Youth ac- 
quaints himself with pain as a wayfellow: 



Ridgely Torrence 303 

Yet even for Youth's fevered blood 

There is a certain balm here in 
This maiden's mouth : O sweet disease ! 

And happy, happy medicine ! 

And maiden, should these bitter tears 
You shed be burdensome, know this : 

There is a cure worth all the pain, 

— To-night — beneath the moon — a kiss. 

Girl, when he gives you kisses twain, 

Use one, and let the other stay ; 
And hoard it. for moons die, red fades, 

And you may need a kiss — some day. 

No one will deny an individual grace of touch 
upon these strings. The artistic value of the 
quatrains is unequal ; they would bear weed- 
ing; and there is a hint of spent impulse in 
the latter part of the volume, though it may 
be only by virtue of the grouping that the 
cleverer stanzas chance to be massed toward 
the front, as they were probably not written 
in the order in which they appear. Here 
and there in the latter part of the volume 
one comes upon some of Mr. Torrence's most 
unique fancies ; and, too, if they do not always 
give one the same pleasurable surprise, they 
are more thoughtful and the verities are in 
them. Indeed, Mr. Torrence's " Psalm of Ex- 
perience " is not altogether born of a happy 



304 The Younger American Poets 

insouciance ; look a bit more closely and you 
penetrate the mask, and a face looks out at 
you, like to your own face, questioning and 
uncertain. We should be glad to quote more 
of Mr. Torrence's quatrains, but must look at 
El Dorado, his more mature work, which won so 
kindly a reception from the critics and public. 

It would be idle to assert that El Dorado is 
a great achievement, but it is a fine achieve- 
ment, and notably so as a first incursion into 
a field beset with snares for the unwary. Into 
some of these Mr. Torrence has fallen, but the 
majority of them he has avoided and has proven 
his right to fare upon the way he has elected. 

As to plot, one may say that El Dorado is a 
moving tale, full of incident and action, and 
sharply defining the characters before the 
mind. The action is focused to a definite point 
in each scene, making an effective climax, and 
in the subtler shading of the story, where Perth, 
the released prisoner, mistaking the love of 
Beatrix d'Estrada for the young officer of the 
expedition, thinks it a requital of his own, Mr. 
Torrence has shown himself sensitive to the 
effects that are psychological rather than objec- 
tive; and, indeed, in this quality, as evinced 
throughout the drama in the character of Perth, 
the essence of Mr. Torrence's art consists. 



Ridgely Torrence 305 

It is more or less an easy artifice for the 
dramatist to reduce his hero to the verge of 
despair just as his heroine is conveniently near 
to save him from leaping over a precipice; but 
artifice becomes art when the impalpable emo- 
tions of a nature lost almost to its own con- 
sciousness begin to be called from diffusion and 
given direction and meaning. While the char- 
acterization of Perth is not altogether free from 
strained sentiment, one recognizes in it a higher 
achievement than went to the making of the 
more spectacular crises of the play. The dra- 
matic materials of El Dorado are in the main 
skilfully handled, and there is logical congru- 
ity in the situations as they evolve, assuming 
the premise of the plot. As an acting play, 
however, it would require the further introduc- 
tion of women characters, Beatrix sustaining 
alone, in its present cast, the feminine element 
of the drama. 

As to the play as literature, as poetry, there 
is much to commend, and somewhat to deplore. 
If it remain as literature, it must contain ele- 
ments that transcend those of its action ; if a 
well-developed plot were literature, then many 
productions of the stage that are purely ephem- 
eral would take their place as works of art. 

Between the dramatic and the theatrical there 

20 



306 The Younger American Poets 

is a nice distinction, and only an artist may 
wholly avoid the pitfalls of the latter. Mr. 
Torrence's drama seems to me to blend the 
two qualities. For illustration the following 
outpouring of Coronado, when he returns for 
a last hour with Beatrix, then disguising to 
follow his army, and finds her faithless to 
the tryst, is purely melodramatic. The Friar 
Ubeda reminds him that the trumpets call 
him, whereupon Coronado exclaims : 

It is no call, but rather do their sounds 
Lash me like brazen whips away from her. 
They shriek two names to me, Honour and Hell ; 
They drive me with two words, Duty and Death. 
These are the things that I can only find 
Outside her arms. 

In the same scene, however, occurs this fine 
passage, compact of hopelessness, and having 
in it the whole heart-history of Perth, who 
speaks it. He is urged by the friar to hasten 
that they may join the expedition as it passes 
the walls : 

Perth. It would be useless. 
Ubeda. In what way ? 

Perth. If to go would be an ill, 

I need not hasten ; it will come to me. 
And if a good, they will have gone too far ; 
I could not overtake them. 



Ridgely Torrence 307 

This passage recalls another memorably fine, 
— that in which Perth upon his release would 
return to his dungeon, being oppressed by the 
light : 

I seem to have to bear the sky's whole arch, 
Like Atlas, on my shoulders. 

This is divining a sensation with subtle sym- 
pathy. But to return to the consideration of 
the literature of Mr. Torrence's drama from the 
standpoint of his characters. Beatrix is a 
natural, elemental type of girl, untroubled by 
subtleties. Impulse and will are one in her 
understanding, and she counts it no shame to 
follow where they lead. The love that exists 
between herself and Coronado discloses no 
great emotional features, no complexities ; but 
it is not strained nor unnatural, and in the 
scene where Beatrix discloses her identity to 
Coronado, as he in desperation at the failure of 
the quest for El Dorado is about to throw him- 
self over the cliff, — while the situation itself 
has elements of melodrama, the dialogue is 
wholly free from it, and indeed contains some 
of the truest poetry in the play. Coronado, 
with distraught fancy, thinks it the spirit of 
Beatrix by whom he is delivered, and fears to 
approach her lest he dissolve the wraith, where- 



308 The Younger American Poets 

upon Beatrix, among other reassurances, speaks 
these lovely lines : — 

Have the snow-textured arms of dreams these pulses? 
Has the pale spirit of sleep a mouth like this ? 

The counter-passion of Mr. Torrence's drama, 
in which its tragedy lies, the passion of 
Perth for Beatrix, is so manifestly foredoomed 
on the side of sentiment that one looks upon 
it purely from a psychological standpoint, but 
from that standpoint it is handled so skilfully 
that the dramatic feeling of the play centres 
chiefly in this character. The Friar Ubeda is 
also strongly drawn, and one of the motive 
forces of the drama. It is he who reveals to 
Perth that he has a son born after his incarcer- 
ation who is none other than the young leader 
of the expedition, Don Francis Coronado, al- 
though his identity is not revealed by the priest, 
and only the clew given that on his hand is 
branded a crucifix, as a foolish penance for 
some boyhood sin. Many of the finest passages 
of the play are spoken between Perth and 
Ubeda. 

The temptation to Shakespearize into which 
nearly all young dramatists fall, Mr. Torrence 
has wholly avoided, nor has his verse any of 
the grandiloquent strain that often mars dra- 



Ridgely Torrence 309 

matic poetry. It is at times over-sustained, 
but is flexible and holds in the main to sim- 
plicity of effect. Such a passage as the fol- 
lowing shows it in its finest quality. Here 
are feeling, consistent beauty, and dignity of 
word. The lines are spoken by Perth in 
reply to Coronado's parting injunction to re- 
member that the Font is there, pointing in 
the direction of their quest : 

O God, 't is everywhere ! 
But where for me ? Youth, love, or hope fulfilled, 
Whatever dew distils from out its depths, 
Sparkles till it has lured my eager lips 
And then sinks back. 'T is in his desolate heart — 
And yet I may not drink. 'T is in her eyes — 
And yet my own cannot be cooled by it. 
The wilderness of life is full of wells, 
But each is barred and walled about and guarded. 

The Source ! Can it be true ? Oh, may it not be ? 

May it not at last await me in that garden 

To which we bleed our way through all this waste ? — 

One cup — some little chalice that will hold 

One drop that will not shudder into mist 

Till I have drained it. 

Passages of this sort might be duplicated in 
El Dorado, were they not too long to quote 
with the context necessary to them. 

The passage cited above holds a deep sug- 
gestion in the lines : — ■ 



3io The Younger American Poets 

One drop that will not shudder into mist 
Till I have drained it. 

Here is human longing epitomized ; and again 
the words in which Coronado speaks, as he 
thinks, to the shade of Beatrix, — 

No, I will no more strive to anything 
And so dispel it, — 

are subtly typical of the fear in all joy, the 
trembling dread to grasp, lest it elude us. 
That, too, is a fine passage in which Coronado 
replies to Perth, who seeks to cheer him with 
thought of the Water of all Dreams: 

Ah, that poor phantom Source ! I never sought it. 
I have found the thing called Youth too deadly bitter 
To grasp at further tasting. 

" The thing called Youth " is often " deadly 
bitter ; " and Mr. Torrence has well suggested it 
in the revulsion from hope to despair which 
follows upon the knowledge that El Dorado is 
but a land of Dead-Sea fruit. The atmosphere 
with which Mr. Torrence has invested the 
scene where all are waiting for the dawn to 
lift and reveal the valley of their desire is 
charged with mystery and portent; one becomes 
a tense, breathless member of the group upon 
the cliff, and not a spectator. 



Ridgely Torrence 311 

Mr. Torrence is occasionally led into tempta- 
tion, artistically speaking, by the seduction of 
his imagination, and is carried a bit beyond the 
point of discretion, as in this passage taken from 
the scene where the expedition awaits the dawn 
on the morning when its dream is expected to 
be realized. Perth and Coronado are looking 
to the mist to lift. Perth speaks : 

And now in that far edge, as though a seed 
Were sown, there is a hint of budding gray, 
A bud not wholly innocent of night, 
And yet a color. 
Cor. But see, it dies ! 

Perth. Yet now it blooms again, 

Whiter, and with a rumor of hidden trumpets. 

Buds in the common day do not usually 
bloom with a " rumor of hidden trumpets." 
In the same scene Coronado asks : 

Can you not see 
The gem which is the mother of all dawn? 

Perth. There is some gleam. 
Cor. It waits one moment yet 

Before it thunders upon our blinded sight ! 

It is at least a new conception that gems should 
thunder upon one's blinded sight I In another 
scene Mr. Torrence has the " devouring sun " 
deepen its " vvormlike course " to the world's 
edge. Again, his heroine's mouth is a little 



312 The Younger American Poets 

tremulous "from all the troubled violets in 
her veins." We are a bit uncertain, too, as to 
the significance of a " throne-galled night ; " 
but these are, after all, minor matters when 
weighed with the prevailing grace and beauty 
of Mr. Torrence's lines. 

The last act of El Dorado has to my mind 
less of strength and beauty than its prede- 
cessors, and dramatically one may question 
its conception and construction. In a gen- 
eral study of Mr. Torrence's plot it seemed 
that the situations were all developed to the 
best advantage, but an exception must, I think, 
be made in regard to the last act. One of the 
vital requisites of drama is that the suspense 
of the action shall hold to the end ; there may 
be minor denouements, but the plot must not 
be so constructed that the element of mystery 
shall have been eliminated ere the close, and 
this is exactly what has been done in El 
Dorado. The two great scenes have already 
taken place : El Dorado has been proven a myth, 
and Beatrix has been united to her lover ; there 
remains but one thread to unravel, the love of 
Perth for Beatrix ; and of that the audience has 
already the full knowledge and clew, having 
seen her rejoined to her lover. The only motive 
of the last act is that the audience may see the 



Ridgely Torrence 313 

effect upon Perth when the revelation of his 
loss is made to him ; and it is more than a 
question whether a scene depending so entirely 
upon the psychology of the situation could hold 
as a climax to the play. 

There is a revelation, however, logically 
demanded by the premises of the plot, in 
expectation of which the interest is held, and 
in whose nonfulfilment I cannot but think that 
Mr. Torrence has lost the opportunity for the 
most humanly true and effective climax of his 
play, — the disclosure to Coronado of his par- 
entage. Ubeda, earlier in the drama, has en- 
joined Perth not to reveal his identity to his 
son, lest it injure his public career ; but in the 
hour when the supreme loss has come, when 
Beatrix, as the wife of Coronado, rejoins the 
homeward detachment of Perth and his friend, 
and the mortal stroke has fallen, — then Ubeda 
should have declared the relationship and 
placed to Perth's lips ere he died the one 
draught that would not " shudder into mist " 
ere he had drained it, — the draught of love 
from the heart of his child. The bird of hope 
and light should hover just above the darkest 
tragedy, — should brood above it with healing 
in its wings. This is partially realized in the 
lines in which Mr. Torrence has chosen to veil, 



314 The Younger American Poets 

and yet hint, the relationship which Coronado 
does not understand : 

Perth. At last I see ! always I seemed to know 

That one day, — though I knew not when, — 

some hour, 
I should behold and know it and possess it, — 
The Font ! 

Cor. No, it is snow and wine. 

Beat. He wanders ! 

Perth. I had not thought to find it so at last, 
Yet here, and here alone, it has arisen 
Within these two — my only youth ! Yes — 

now ! 
Upon this hour and place at last ! The Source ! 
It is a barren place — yet flowers are here, 
Those which for certain days I seemed to lose ; 
A desolate tender fatherhood has here 
Found growth, and bears, but all too piteously, 
A futile bud. 

The impression left upon one by El Dorado 
is that of poetic distinction, and the drama in 
its character drawing, plot and action is an 
augury of finer possibilities in the same branch 
of art. 



XVII 

GERTRUDE HALL 

MISS GERTRUDE HALL is a poet 
of the intimate mood, the personal 
touch, one who writes for herself 
primarily, and not for others. One fancies 
that verses such as these were penned in 
musing, introspective moments in the form in 
which they flitted through the mind, and were 
indesecrate of further touch. They are as 
words warm upon the lips, putting one in 
magnetic rapport with a speaker; and their 
defects, as well as distinctions, are such as 
spring from this spontaneity. Frequently a 
change of word or line, readily suggested to 
the reader, would have made technically per- 
fect what now bears a flaw ; but these lapses are 
neither so marked nor so frequent as to detract 
from the prevailing grace of the verse, and but 
serve to illustrate the point in question, — their 
unpremeditated note and freedom from posing. 
One is not so much arrested by the inevi- 
table s image and word in these lyrics of the 



316 The Younger American Poets 

Age of Fairy gold, as by the feeling, the mood, 
that pervades them. It is not a buoyant mood, 
nor yet a sombre one, but rather the expression 
of a varied impulse, a melody of many stops, 
such as one might play for himself at evening, 
wandering from theme to theme. The poems 
convey the impression of coming in touch with 
a personality rather than a book, the veil be- 
tween the author and reader being impalpable; 
and this, their most obvious distinction, is a 
quality in which many poets of the present day 
are lacking, either from a mistaken delicacy in 
regarding their own inner life as an isolated 
mood not of import to others, or in robbing 
it of personality and warmth by technical 
elaboration. 

One may confide to the world by means of 
art what he would not reveal to his closest 
friend, and yet keep inviolate his spiritual self- 
hood; but to withhold this disclosure, to be- 
come but a poet of externals, is to abrogate 
one's claim to speak at all ; for a life, however 
meagre, has something unique and essential 
to convey, and while one delights in the artist 
observation, the vivid pictorial touch, it must 
not be divorced from the subjective. The 
poems of Miss Hall are happily blended of the 
objective and subjective; here, for illustration, 



Gertrude Hall 317 

is a lighter note bringing one in thrall to that 
seductive, tantalizing charm, that irresistible 
allurement, of the Vita Nuova of the year: 

I try to fix my eyes upon my book, 
But just outside a budding spray 
Flaunts its new leaves as if to say, 
" Look ! — look ! " 

I trim my pen, I make it fine and neat ; 
There comes a flutter of brown wings. 
A little bird alights and sings, 
"Sweet ! — sweet!" 

O little bird, O go away ! be dumb ! 
For I must ponder certain lines ; 
And straight a nodding flower makes signs, 
" Come ! — come ! " 

O Spring, let me alone ! O bird, bloom, beam, 
" I have no time to dream ! " I cry ; 
The echo breathes a soft, long sigh, 
" Dream ! — dream ! " 

The beautiful lyric, 

" Ah, worshipped one, ah, faithful Spring ! " 

tempers this blitheness to a pensive strain, 
though only as one may introduce a note of 
minor in a staccato melody. In another bit of 
verse celebrating the renewing year, and noting 
how joy lays his finger on one's lips and makes 
him mute, occur these delicate lines: 



318 The Younger American Poets 

Thrice happy, oh, thrice happy still the Earth 
That can express herself in roses, yea, 
Can make the lily tell her inmost thought ! 

One nature lyric of two stanzas, despite the 
fact that its cadence halts in the final couplet, 
is compact of atmosphere ; and to one who has 
been companioned by the pines, it brings an 
aromatic breath, full of stimulus: 

The sun in the pine is sleeping, sleeping. 

The drops of resin gleam. . . . 
There 's a mighty wizard with perfumes keeping 

My brain benumbed in a dream ! 

The wind in the pine is rushing, rushing, 

Fine and unfettered and wild. . . . 
There's a mighty mother imperiously hushing 

Her fretful, uneasy child ! 

These lines give over pictures of mornings in 
the radiant sunlight of the North, that cloud- 
less, lifted air ; and " The drops of resin gleam," 
has the same touch of transmutation that some 
suggestion of the brine has for the exiled native 
of the seaboard. 

Miss Hall's themes are not sought far afield, 
but bring, in nearly all the poems, a hint of 
persona] experience; nature, love, spiritual 
emotion, blending with lighter moods and 
fancies, comprise the record of the Age of 
Fairygold. We have glanced at the nature 



Gertrude Hall 319 

verse; that upon love is subtler in touch, but 
holds to the intimate note distinguishing all of 
her work. The second of these stanzas con- 
tains a graphic image : 

Be good to me ! If all the world united 

Should bend its powers to gird my youth with pain, 

Still might I fly to thee, Dear, and be righted — 
But if thou wrong'st me, where shall I complain? 

I am the dove a random shot surprises, 

That from her flight she droppeth quivering, 

And in the deadly arrow recognizes 
A blood-wet feather — once in her own wing ! 

In her poem called " The Rival " human nature 
speaks a direct word, particularly in the con- 
tradiction of the last stanza. The lines have 
the quality of speech rather than of print : 

This is the hardest of my fate : 
She 's better whom he doth prefer 

Than I am that he worshipped late, 
As well as so much prettier, 

So much more fortunate ! 

He '11 not repent ; oh, you will see, 
She '11 never give him cause to grieve ! 

I dream that he comes back to me, 
Leaving her, — but he '11 never leave ! 

Hopelessly sweet is she. 

So that if in my place she stood, 

She 'd spare to curse him, she 'd forgive ! 



320 The Younger American Poets 

I loathe her, but I know she would — 

And so will I, God, as I live, 
Not she alone is good ! 

The ethical inconsistency of the above stanza, 
" I loathe her," and " Not she alone is good," 
is so human and racy with suggestion of these 
paradoxical moods of ours, that the stanza, 
together with its companion lines, becomes a 
leaf torn from the book of life. 

In its spiritual quality Miss Hall's work 
shows, perhaps, its finest distinction : brave, 
strong, acquiescent, inducing in one a nobler 
mood, — such is the spirit of the volume. Its 
philosophy is free from didacticism or moral- 
izing; indeed, it should scarcely be called 
philosophy, but rather the personal record of 
experiences touching the inner life, — phases 
of feeling interpreted in their spiritual import. 
These lines express the mood: 

Then lead me, Friend. Here is my hand, 

Not in dumb resignation lent 
Because Thee one cannot withstand — 

In love, Lord, with complete consent. 



Lead. If we come to the cliff's crest, 
And I hear deep below — O deep ! — 

The torrent's roar, and " Leap ! " Thou say'st, 
I will not question — I will leap. 



Gertrude Hall 321 

The last stanza, in its vivid illustrative qual- 
ity, is an admirable expression of spiritual 
assurance. 

Another brief lyric rings with the true note 
of valor, declaring the eternal potency of hope, 
and one's obligation to pass on his unspent 
faith, though falling by the way: 

Could I not be the pilgrim 

To reach my saint's abode, 

I would make myself the road 
To lead some other pilgrim 

Where my soul's treasure glowed. 

Could not I in the eager van 
Be the stalwart pioneer 
Who points where the way is clear, 

I would be the man who sinks in the swamp, 
And cries to the rest, " Not here ! " 

From an Eastern Apologue Miss Hall has 
drawn a charming illustration of the power of 
influence and association : 

" Thou smelPst not ill, thou object plain, 
Thou art a small, pretentious grain 

Of amber, I suppose." 
" Nay, my good friend, I am by birth 
A common clod of scentless earth . . . 

But I lived with the Rose." 

In the poems of a blither note, Miss Hall 

excels, having a swift and sprightly fancy and 

21 



322 The Younger American Poets 

a clever aptness of phrase, which, in Allegretto, 
her collection of lighter verse, reveals itself in 
charming witticisms and whimsicalities. Her 
children's poems are delicate in touch and 
fancy, and quaintly humorous. Her lines, 
" To A Weed," in the second collection, tuck 
away a moral in their sprightly comment; in- 
deed, a bit of philosophy as to being glad in 
the sun and taking one's due of life, despite 
limitations, which renders them more than the 
merry apostrophe they seem: 

You bold thing ! thrusting '"neath the very nose 
Of her fastidious majesty, the rose, 
Even in the best ordained garden bed, 
Unauthorized, your smiling little head ! 

The gardener, mind ! will come in his big boots, 
And drag you up by your rebellious roots, 
And cast you forth to shrivel in the sun, 
Your daring quelled, your little weed's life done. 

Meantime — ah, yes ! the air is very blue, 
And gold the light, and diamond the dew, — 
You laugh and courtesy in your worthless way, 
And you are gay, ah, so exceeding gay ! 

You argue, in your manner of a weed, 
You did not make yourself grow from a seed ; 
You fancy you 've a claim to standing-room, 
You dream yourself a right to breathe and bloom. 



Gertrude Hall 323 

You know, you weed, I quite agree with you, 
I am a weed myself, and I laugh too, — 
Both, just as long as we can shun his eye, 
Let ? s sniff at the old gardener trudging by ! 

In the art of compression, in consistent and re- 
strained imagery, in clearness and simplicity, 
and in freedom from affectation, Miss Hall's 
work is altogether commendable. In technique 
she makes no ambitious flights, employing 
almost wholly the more direct and simple forms 
and metres, but these suit the intimate mood 
and singing note of her themes better than 
more intricate measures. Technically her chief 
defect is in the disregard which she frequently 
shows for the demands of metre. I say dis- 
regard, for it is evident from the grace of 
the majority of her work that she allows her- 
self to depart from metrical canons at her 
own will, with the occasional result of jagged 
lines which may have seemed more expressive 
to Miss Hall than those of a smoother cadence, 
but which are likely to offend the ear of one 
sensitive to rhythm. These lapses are not, 
however, so frequent or conspicuous as to con- 
stitute a general indictment against the work. 

The reflective predominates over the imagi- 
native in the Age of Fairy go Id, notwithstanding 
the suggestion of the title. Indeed, there is a 



324 The Younger American Poets 

subtly pensive note running through the volume, 
which remains in one's mind as a characteristic 
impression when the lighter notes are forgotten. 
They are not poems of vivid color, imagination, 
nor passion, though touched with all. They 
are not incrusted with verbal gems, though 
the diction is fitting and graceful. They have 
no daringly inventive metres, though the form 
is always in harmony with the thought, — in 
short, the poems of Miss Hall are such as 
please and satisfy without startling. They are 
leaves from the book of the heart, and admit us 
to many a kindred experience. These lines, 
in which we must take leave of them, carry 
the wistful, tender, sympathetic note, which dis- 
tinguishes much of her work: 

Though true it be these splendid dreams of mine 
Are but as bubbles little children blow, 
And that Fate laughs to see them wax and shine, 
Then holds out her pale finger — and they go : 
One bitter drop falls with a tear-like gleam, — 
Still, dreaming is so sweet ! Still, let me dream ! 

Though true, to love may be defined thus : 

To open wide your safe defenceless hall 

To some great guest full-armed and dangerous, 

With power to ravage, to deface it all, 

A cast at dice, whether or no he will, — 

Still, loving is so sweet ! Let me love still ! 




XVIII 

ARTHUR UPSON 

HEN a volume of verse by Mr. 
Arthur Upson, entitled Octaves In 

An Oxford Garden, was first brought 
to my notice by a poet friend with what seemed 
before reading it a somewhat extravagant com- 
ment as to its art, it evoked a certain scepti- 
cism as to whether the poet in question would 
be equally enthusiastic, had he read, marked, 
learned, and inwardly digested some eighty or 
more volumes of verse within a given period, 
thus rendering a more rarely flavored com- 
pound necessary to excite anew the poetry-sated 
appetite ; but Mr. Upson's Octaves proved to 
be a brew into which had fallen this magic 
drop, and moments had gone the way of ob- 
livion until the charm was drained. 

The volume consists of some thirty Octaves 
written in Wadham Garden at Oxford in the 
reminiscent month of September ; and so do 
they fix the mood of the place that one marvels 
at the restfulness, the brooding stillness, the 



326 The Younger American Poets 

flavor of time and association which Mr. Up- 
son has managed to infuse into his musing, 
sabbatical lines. One regrets that the term 
" atmosphere " has become so cheapened, for in 
the exigent moment when no other will serve 
as well, he has the depressing consciousness 
that virtue has gone from the word he must 
employ. Despite this fact, it is atmosphere, in 
its most pervasive sense, that imbues Mr. Up- 
son's Octaves, as the first will attest: 

The day was like a Sabbath in a swoon. 

Under late summer's blue were fair cloud-things 
Poising aslant upon their charmed wings, 

Arrested by some backward thought of June. 

Softly I trod and with repentant shoon, 
Half fearfully in sweet imaginings, 
Where lay, as might some golden court of kings, 

The old Quadrangle paved with afternoon. 

What else than a touch of genius is in those 
three words, " paved with afternoon," as fixing 
the tempered light, the drowsy calm, of the 
place ? 

The Octaves are written in groups, the 
poems of each having a slight dependence upon 
one another, so that to be quoted they require 
the connecting thought. In many cases also 
the first or the second quatrain of the Octave 
is more artistic than its companion lines, as in 



Arthur Upson 327 

the one which follows, where the first four lines 
hold the creative beauty : 

As here among the well-remembering boughs, 
Where every leaf is tongue to ancient breath, 
Speech of the yesteryears forgathereth, 

And all the winds are long-fulfill6d vows — 

So from of old those ringing names arouse 
A whispering in the foliate shades of death, 
Where History her golden rosary saith, 

Glowing, the light of Memory on her brows. 

This Octave illustrates also what may be 
made as a general statement regarding its com- 
panions in the volume, that while the glamour 
may not rest equally upon the poems, they do 
not lack charm and distinction even in their 
less creative touches; and there are few in 
which there does not lurk some surprise in 
the way of picturesque phrasing. 

In the ordering of his cadences Mr. Upson 
shows a musician's sense of rhythm ; note, 
for example, how the transposition in the 
following lines enhances their melody and con- 
veys in the initial one the sense of a river 
flowing: : 



'<D 



It was the lip of murmuring Thames along 

When new lights sought the wood all strangely fair, 
Such quiet lights as saints transfigured wear 

In minster windows crept the glades among. 



328 The Younger American Poets 

And far as from some hazy hill, yet strong, 

Methought an upland shepherd piped it there, 
Waking a silvern echo from her lair : 

" Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song ! " 

Mr. Upson not only obeys by artist instinct 
the laws of counterpoint, but employs the 
word with the music in it, and his effects are 
achieved by the innate harmony of his diction 
and the poetry in the theme he is shaping. 
Take as an illustration of this his Octave 
upon the " Roman Glassware Preserved in the 
Ashmolean." Doubtless those fragments of 
crystal, sheathed, by centuries in the earth, in a 
translucent film through which shine tints of 
mother-of-pearl, have met the eyes of many 
of us, but it needed a poet to deduce from them 
this illustration : 

Fair crystal cups are dug from earth's old crust, 
Shattered but lovely, for, at price of all 
Their shameful exile from the banquet-hall, 

They have been bargaining beauties from the dust. 

So, dig my life but deep enough, you must 

Find broken friendships round its inner wall — 
Which once my careless hand let slip and fall — 

Brave with faint memories, rich in rainbow-rust ! 

One notes in Mr. Upson's work a restraint 
that is the apogee of good taste. He conveys 
the mood, whether of love or other emotion, 



Arthur Upson 329 

and makes his feeling another's, but the veil of 
the temple is never wholly rent ; one may but 
divine the ministries and sacrifices of its altar. 
He is an idealist, not yet come to the place of 
disillusion ; though wandering at times near to 
the border of that chilly realm, he wraps his 
seamless robe of dreams more closely about 
him and turns back. Mr. Upson is not, how- 
ever, an unthinking singer to whom all is cheer 
because he has not the insight to enter into 
those phases of life that have not yet touched 
him ; on the contrary, his note is not a blithe one, 
it is meditative, inclining to the philosophical, 
and tinctured with a certain pensiveness. 

Now and again the cosmos thrusts forward a 
suggestion which becomes the motive of one of 
the Octaves, as when the garden breeze loosens 
from the chink a 

. . . measure of earth 
To match my body's dust when its rebirth 
To sod restores old functions I forsook, — 

which, in turn, induces a reflection upon the 
microcosm : 

Strange that a sod for just a thrill or two 
Should ever be seduced into the round 
Of change in which its present state is found 

In this my form ! forsake its quiet, true 



330 The Younger American Poets 

And fruitfullest retirement, to go through 

The heat, the strain, the languor and the wound ! 
Forget soft rain to hear the stormier sound, — 

Exchange for burning tears its peaceful dew ! 

Again one has the applied illustration both 
of the pains and requitals that cling about the 
sod in its " strange estate of flesh," in these 
lines declaring that 

Some dust of Eden eddies round us yet. 

Some clay o' the Garden, clinging in the breast, 

Down near the heart yet bides unmanifest. 
Last eve in gardens strange to me I let 
The path lead far ; and lo, my vision met 

Old forfeit hopes. I, as on homeward quest, 

By recognizing trees was bidden rest, 
And pitying leaves looked down and sighed, " Forget ! " 

Mr. Upson has one of his characteristic touches 
in the words " old forfeit hopes," pictured as 
starting suddenly before one in the new path 
that has beguiled him. In looking over the Oc- 
taves, which embrace a variety of themes, one 
doubts if his selections have adequately repre- 
sented the finely textured lines, pure and indi- 
vidual diction, and the ripe and mellow- flavor 
of it all. 

Mr. Upson's work has had its meed of recog- 
nition abroad: his first volume, Westwind Songs, 
contained a warmly appreciative introduction by 



Arthur Upson 331 

" Carmen Sylva," the poet-queen of Roumania, 
and his drama, The City, just issued in Edin- 
burgh, is introduced by Count Lutzow of the 
University of Prague, a well-known scholar 
and authority upon Bohemian literature. Tak- 
ing a backward glance at the first volume 
before looking at The City, one finds few of 
the ear-marks of a first collection of poetry, 
which it must become the subsequent effort 
of the writer to live down. 

The lines " When We Said Good-Bye " are 
among the truest in feeling, though almost 
too intimate to quote; and this sympathetic 
lyric, entitled " Old Gardens," has a delicate 
grace : 

J 
The white rose tree that spent its musk 

For lovers' sweeter praise, 

The stately walks we sought at dusk, 

Have missed thee many days. 

Again, with once-familiar feet, 

I tread the old parterre — 
But, ah, its bloom is now less sweet 

Than when thy face was there. 

I hear the birds of evening call ; 

I take the wild perfume ; 
I pluck a rose — to let it fall 

And perish in the gloom. 



332 The Younger American Poets 

Westwind Songs, how 'ever, waft other thoughts 
than those of love. There is a heavier freight 
in this " Thought of Stevenson " : 

High and alone I stood on Calton Hill 
Above the scene that was so dear to him 
Whose exile dreams of it made exile dim. 

October wooed the folded valleys till 

In mist they blurred, even as our eyes upfill 
Under a too sweet memory ; spires did swim, 
And gables rust-red, on the gray sea's brim — 

But on these heights the air was soft and still. 

Yet not all still : an alien breeze did turn 
Here as from bournes in aromatic seas, 

As round old shrines a new-freed soul might yearn 
With incense to his earthly memories. 

And then this thought : Mist, exile, searching pain, 

But the brave soul is free, is home again ! 

How fine is the imaginative thought of 
October wooing the valleys till they blurred 
with mist, as one's " eyes upfill under a too 
sweet memory," and still finer the touch of the 
" alien breeze " turning 

Here as from bournes in aromatic seas. 

So one might imagine the journeying winds 
blowing hither from Vaea, and the intensely 
human soul of Stevenson yearning to the vital 
sympathies of earth. 

Mr. Upson has recently published in Edin- 



Arthur Upson 333 

burgh and America a poem-drama entitled The 
City, and containing, as previously mentioned, 
a scholarly introduction by Count Liitzow of 
the Bohemian University of Prague, who points 
out the historical and traditional sources of the 
story. 

The drama is embraced in one act, and covers 
a period of but one day, from dawn to dusk ; 
nevertheless, it is not wanting in incident, since 
its operative causes reach their culmination in 
this period. The " conditions precedent" of 
the plot, briefly summarized, show that Abgar, 
King of Edessa, has married Cleonis, an Athe- 
nian, whose foster-sister, Stilbe, having been an 
earlier favorite of the king, is actuated by jeal- 
ousy of the pair, and although dwelling as an 
inmate of the royal household, plots with her 
lover, Belarion, against the government of the 
king, ill at his palace outside the city and 
awaiting the arrival of Jesus to heal him of 
his disease. 

The subjects of Abgar have rebelled not only 
at his protracted absence from the city, in dal- 
liance, as they deem it, with the Athenian queen, 
but because of measures of reform instituted 
by him which had done despite to their ancient 
idolatries and desecrated certain shrines in the 
public improvements of the city. 



334 The Younger American Poets 

Not only had the king progressed beyond 
his day in the material advancement of his 
realm, but his eager, swiftly conceiving mind 
had imaged a spiritual ideal even more vital ; 
and at the opening of the drama he awaits the 
coming of the Nazarene to heal him, that he may 
devote himself to the development of his people. 

The scene opens at the dawn in the portico 
of the palace, where the queen's women, attired 
in white pepli, have spent the night singing 
soft music to the accompaniment of the lyre to 
charm the fevered sleep of the king. They are 
dismissed by Agamede, cousin of the queen, 
who detains Stilbe to learn the cause of her 
discontent. Sufficient is revealed to indicate that 
Belarion, the betrothed of Stilbe, whom the 
oracle has declared a man of promise, is plot- 
ting against the life of the king, aided in this 
design by Stilbe, who has been summoned almost 
from the marriage altar to attend the queen. 

The second scene takes place four hours 
later, in the palace garden, and pictures the 
return of the messenger and his attendants 
sent to conduct Jesus to Edessa. The open- 
ing dialogue occurs between Ananias, the 
returned messenger, and the old and learned 
doctor of the court, who details with elaborate 
minuteness the ministries of his skill since the 



Arthur Upson 335 

departure of the former to Jerusalem. While 
this dialogue is characteristic, well phrased, 
and indirectly humorous, it is a dramatic mis- 
take to introduce it at such length, retarding 
the action, which should be focused sharply 
upon the essential motive of the scene, — the 
conveying to the queen the message of the 
Nazarene and the incidents of his refusal. 
The literary quality of the dialogue between the 
queen and Ananias has much beauty, being 
memorable for the picture it conveys of Jesus 
among his disciples at Bethany, " a hamlet up 
an olive-sprinkled hill," where, guided by Philip, 
the Galilean, the messenger found him. The 
description of the personality and manner of 
Christ is a subtle piece of portraiture. To the 
question of Cleonis, — 

Tell me of his appearance. What said he? 
Ananias replies : 

He had prepared this scroll and gave it me 
With courteous words, yet, as I after thought, 
Most singularly free from deference 
For one who ranks with artisans. His look 
Betrayed no satisfaction with our suit ; 
Yet did he emanate a grave respect 
Which seemed habitual, much as Stoics use, 
Yet kinder ; and his bearing had more grace 
Than any Jew's I ever saw before. 



336 The Younger American Poets 

As for his words, I own I scarce recall them, 
And have been wondering ever since that I, 
Bred at a Court and tutored to brave deeds, 
Should be so sudden silenced. For I stood 
Obedient to unknown authorities 
Which spake in eye and tone and every move, 
In that his first mild answer of refusal. 

Ere the departure of the king's embassy from 
Jerusalem, the tragic drama of the crucifixion 
had been enacted and in part witnessed by them, 
which Ananias also describes with graphic 
force; in it appears an adaptation of the Ve- 
ronica story. The lines well convey the picture : 

As the way widened past the high-walled house 

Of Berenis, the throng thinned, and I saw 

Plainer the moving figure of the man 

And the huge beam laid on him. Suddenly 

From the great gate I saw a form dart forth 

Straight towards him, pause, and seem to have some speech 

With the condemned, as, by old privilege, 

Sometimes the pious ladies do with those 

Who tread the shameful road. Her speech was brief. 

She turned, and, as I saw 'twas Berenis, 

Towards me she came, and her eyes, wet with tears, 

Smiled sadlv, and she said these final words : 

" Such shame a mighty purpose led him to, 
Yet he shrinks not, but steadfast to this end 
Inevitable hath he come his way. 
A woman of my house was healed of him 
By kissing once the border of his garment. 



Arthur Upson 337 

Take your King this, and say that as he dragged 
His cruel but chosen cross to his own doom 
Some comfort in its cooling web he found, 
And left a blessing in its pungent folds." 

In the third scene of the drama, occurring 
in the afternoon, Abgar is informed of the 
Healer's refusal to accede to his request, but in 
the presence of the queen and the attendants 
assembled in the royal garden, the letter of the 
Nazarene, promising healing and peace, is read 
to him by the returned envoy, and at length the 
linen, received from the hand of Berenis, and 
upon whose folds the healing power of Christ 
had been invoked, is given into the keeping of 
Abgar, through whose veins, as by the visible 
touch of the divine hand, the current of new 
life throbs and courses. The moment is fraught 
with intense reality, which Mr. Upson has kept 
as much as possible to such effects as transcend 
words. Just previous to the vital transformation 
Abgar has said : 

I have not yet resolved the Healer's words 
Into clear meaning ; but their crystal soon 
In the still cup of contemplation may 
Give up its precious drug to heal our cares, — 

but the supreme end was not wrought by con- 
templation, nor could its processes be resolved 

22 



338 The Younger American Poets 

by analysis, or other words be found to proclaim 
it than the simple but thrilling exclamation : 
I feel it now ! All through these withered veins 
I feel it bound and glow ! O life, life, life ! 

From this period the incidents of the drama 
develop with all the tensity of action which pre- 
vious to this scene it has lacked, giving to the 
close a certain sense of crowding when compared 
with the slow movement of the previous scenes 
consisting chiefly of recital, well told, but with 
little to enact, making the work to this point 
rather a graphically related story than a drama. 
The incidents which come on apace in the 
latter part of the play have, to be sure, been 
foreshadowed in the earlier part, but one is 
scarcely prepared for the swift succession of 
events, nor for their bloody character after the 
sabbatical mood into which the earlier scenes 
of the work have thrown him. If the drama 
covered a longer period, giving time between 
scenes for the development of events, even 
though such development were but suggested 
by a statement of dates, the impression of 
undue haste in the climax would be obviated ; 
but in the interval of one day, even though all 
events leading to the issue have been working 
silently for months or years, their culmination 
seems to come without due preparation to the 



Arthur Upson 339 

reader's mind, and one is swept off his feet by 
consummations with whose causes he had 
scarcely reckoned. 

Immediately following the healing of Abgar, 
the queen's cousin, Agamede, enters breathless 
and announces to the king the plot on foot to 
overthrow him, which inspires the king with a 
resolve to set forth at once to the city. Upon 
the attempt of the queen to deter him, Abgar 
relates a prophetic dream of his city and its 
destiny through him, which is one of the finest 
conceptions, both in spiritual import and eleva- 
tion of phrase, contained in the drama. The 
dream is related as having appeared to the 
king in three distinct visions, glimpsing his 
city in its past, present, and future. It is too 
long to follow in detail, but this glimpse is from 
the vision of the past, where 

Through that wreck of fortress, mart and fane 
And fallen mausoleum crowded o'er 
With characters forevermore unread, 
Only the wind's soft hands went up and down 
Scattering the obliterative sands. 
I, led in trance by shapes invisible, 
Approached a temple's splendid architrave 
Half sunk in sod betwixt its columns' bases, 
And there by sudden divination read 
The deep-cut legend of that awful gate : 

Appease with sacrifice the unknown powers. 



340 The Younger American Poets 

The next vision is of the city in its present 
state, " builded on like dust," but teeming with 
activity and material purpose, through which 
a glimmering ideal begins to dawn : 

They toiled, or played, or fought, or sued the gods, 
Absorbed each in his own peculiar lust, 
As if there were no morrow watching them ; 
Yet each was happier in the morrow-dream 
Than ever in all achieved yesterdays. 

Then is revealed to the mind of Abgar the 
high commission intrusted to him : 

And as I looked, I saw a man who long 

In upward meditation on his roof 

Sat all alone, communing with his soul, 

And he arose, and presently went down, 

Down in the long black streets among his kind, 

And there with patience taught them steadfastly; 

But, for the restless souls he made in them, 

They turned and slew him and went on their ways, 

And a great fog crept up and covered all. 

Here surely is keen spiritual psychology, 
that " for the restless souls he made in them" 
they slew him. All martyrdoms are traced to 
their source in this line, which holds also the 
suggestive truth as to the final acceptance of 
that for which the prophet dies. Once having 
planted the seed whose stirring makes the 
"restless soul," its growth is committed to the 



Arthur Upson 341 

Law, and can no more be prevented than the 

shining of the sun or the flowing of the tides. 

Abgar was granted a third vision, of the city 

in its embodied ideal ; its ultimate beauty and 

achievement were given definite shape before 

him, and the recital ends with the triumphal 

note: 

Fear not for me : I go unto the city ! 

The last scene is enacted an hour later in 
the garden lighted only by the moon, and opens 
with the lyric sung by Agamede to the blossom- 
ing oleander-tree 'neath which her child lies 
buried. These are lines of a pathos as delicate 
and spiritual as the moonlight, the fragrance, 
the memory inspiring them : 

Grow, grow, thou little tree, 
His body at the roots of thee ; 
Since last year's loveliness in death 
The living beauty nourisheth. 

Bloom, bloom, thou little tree, 
Thy roots around the heart of me ; 
Thou canst not blow too white and fair 
From all the sweetness hidden there. 

Die, die, thou little tree, 
And be as all sweet things must be ; 
Deep where thy petals drift I, too, 
Would rest the changing seasons through. 



342 The Younger American Poets 

Then follows a dialogue of warmly emotional 
feeling between the king and queen, in the in- 
terval of waiting for the chariot and attendants 
to be brought to the gate. All the physical 
side of the healing of Abgar has now been 
resolved into its spiritual meaning, and he 
reinterprets the words of the Nazarene's mes- 
sage that of his infirmity he shall know full cure 
and those most dear to him have peace ; but 
while Abgar speaks of his changed ideal, look- 
ing now to a " city which hath foundations, 
whose builder and maker is God," a clamor is 
heard at the gate, and the body-slave rushes 
to the king with the tidings that armed troops 
approach the palace, and begs him to flee in the 
waiting chariot. Spurning thought of escape, 
the king and queen mount the dais and stand 
calmly watching in the moonlight the heroic 
spectacle of the approaching army. At this 
moment the queen's women rush into the 
garden, demanding flight; the conflict begins 
along the wall ; the gate bursts open, and An- 
anias retreats to the garden, wounded, and 
shortly dies. A brief interval of quiet, but full 
of portent, succeeds, when Stilbe, who had plot- 
ted with the king's enemies, rushes through 
the gate, pursued by the soldiers and bleeding 
from wounds of their sabres. She is shot, ap- 



Arthur Upson 343 

parently by the hand of her former lover, Bela- 
rion, and falls dead at the king's feet. Here 
Mr. Upson leaves an unravelled thread of his 
plot, or at least one for whose clew I have 
sought vainly. No cause has been shown for 
violence toward her on the part of the soldiers 
whom she aids, nor on that of her supposed 
lover and betrothed, Belarion. Why, then, she 
should become his victim, or why he should 
look upon her dead body and exclaim : 

" Thus Fate helps out ! " 

is at least a riddle past my solving. If, as the 
results indicate, Belarion has been using Stilbe 
as a tool to aid his ambitions, it should scarcely 
have been related in good faith in the beginning 
of the drama that their marriage was to be 
celebrated the week in which the action of the 
play falls. If logical reasons exist for this 
change of front, Mr. Upson should have indi- 
cated them more clearly. 

The climax of the play follows immediately 
upon the death of Stilbe, when the king, called 
to account by the insolent Belarion, in right- 
eous indignation strikes him down. It may be 
questioned whether such a deed could follow so 
quickly upon the rapt spiritual state to which 
the king had been lifted ; but one inclines to 



344 The Younger American Poets 

rejoice that the natural man, impelled by who 
shall say what higher force, triumphed, ere 
the queen, pointing to the dead body of the 
trusted messenger, Ananias, and repeating 
the Nazarene's words, " Those most dear to 
you have peace," — demanded of the king his 
blade. 

As they stand defenceless but assured, the 
soldiers, awed by the might of some inner force 
in the king, shrink back, and the drama closes 
with the victorious words, — 

Together, Love, we go unto the city ! 

Though the play, looked upon from a dra- 
matic standpoint, lacks in the earlier scenes a 
certain magnetism of touch and vividness of 
action, and in the last scene is somewhat over- 
charged with them, it has many finely con- 
ceived situations which strike the golden mean, 
and the characterization throughout is strongly 
defined. Its literary quality must, however, 
take precedence of its dramatic in the truer ap- 
praisal. In diction it shows none of the strained 
effort toward the supposed speech of an earlier 
time, which usually distinguishes poetic dramas 
laid far in the past, but has throughout a fitting 
dignity and harmony, combined with ease and 
flexibility of phrase and frequent eloquence of 



Arthur Upson 345 

dialogue, especially in the passages spoken by 
Abgar. 

It is a play rather of character and high 
motive than of plot, a piece of sheer ideal- 
ism, notable alike for its spiritual and its 
poetic quality. 



BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX 



BROWN, Alice. Born Hampton Falls, N. H., Dec. 5, 1857. 
Graduated Robinson Seminary, Exeter, N. H., 1876. 
On staff of Youth's Companion. Author : Fools of Nature ; 
Meadow-Grass; By Oak and Thorn (English travels); 
Life of Mercy Otis Warren ; The Road to Castaly 
(poems) ; The Days of his Youth ; Robert Louis Ste- 
venson, A Study (with Louise I. Guiney) ; Tiverton 
Tales ; King's End ; Margaret Warrener ; The Manner- 
ings ; Judgment. Resides in Boston. 

BURTON, Richard. Born Hartford, Conn., March 14, 1859. 
Graduated Trinity College, Hartford. Ph.D. Johns Hop- 
kins, 1887. Married Oct. 7, 1889. Taught Old English 
Johns Hopkins, 1888. Managing Editor N. Y. Church- 
man, 1888-89. Travelled in Europe, 1889-90. Literary 
Editor Hartford Courant, 1890-97. Associate Editor War- 
ner Library World's Best Literature, 1897-99. Professor 
English Literature, University of Minnesota, 1 898-1 902. 
Editor Lothrop Publishing Co., 1902-04. Lectures upon 
literature and the drama. Author : (verse) Dumb in June, 
1895; Memorial Day, 1897; Lyrics of Brotherhood, 1899; 
Message and Melody, 1903 ; (prose) Literary Likings, 
essays, 1898; Life of Whittier, in Beacon Biography 
Series, 1900; Forces in Fiction, essays, 1902. Resides 
in Boston. 

CARMAN, Bliss. Born Fredericton, N. B., April 15, 1861. 
Graduate University of New Brunswick, 1881. Post- 
graduate student University of Edinburgh, 1882-83, and of 
Harvard, 1886-88. Studied law, practised civil engineer- 
ing, taught school. Office Editor N. Y. Independent, 
1890-1902. For past four years has contributed a weekly 
column, called " Marginal Notes," to the Evening Post, 



348 Biographical Index 

Chicago, The Transcript, Boston, and the Commercial 
Advertiser, N. Y. Unmarried. Author: Low Tide on 
Grand Pre', 1893; A Sea-Mark, 1895; Behind the Arras, 
1895 ; Ballads of Lost Haven, 1897 ; By the Aurelian Wall, 
1897; Songs from Vagabondia, in collaboration with 
Richard Hovey, 1894; More Songs from Vagabondia, 
1896; Last Songs from Vagabondia, 1900; St. Kavin, a 
Ballad, 1894; At Michaelmas, 1895; The Girl in the 
Poster, 1897; The Green Book of the Bards, 1898; Ven- 
geance of Noel Bassard, 1899; Ode on the Coronation of 
King Edward, 1902 j From the Book of Myths, 1902; 
Pipes of Pan No. 1, 1902; Pipes of Pan No. 2, 1903; 
The Word at St. Kavins, 1903 ; Sappho : One Hundred 
Lyrics, 1903. Resides in New York. 

CAWEIN, Madison Julius. Born Louisville, Ky., March 23, 
1865. Graduated at High School in Louisville, 1886. 
Since then has confined himself to the writing of verse. 
Author: Blooms of the Berry, 1887; The Triumph of 
Music, 1888; Accolon of Gaul, 1889; Lyrics and Idyls, 
1890; Days and Dreams, 1891 ; Moods and Memories, 
1892; Red Leaves and Roses, 1893 ; Poems of Nature and 
Love, 1893; Intimations of the Beautiful, 1894; The White 
Snake (translations from German poets), 1895 ; Under- 
tones, 1896; The Garden of Dreams, 1896; Shapes and 
Shadows, 1898; Idyllic Monologues, 1898; Myth and 
Romance, 1899; Weeds by the Wall, 1901 ; One Day 
and Another, 1901 ; Kentucky Poems (selections pub- 
lished in London with an Introduction by Edmund Gosse), 
1902; A Voice on the Wind, 1902. Resides Louisville, 
Ky. 

FENOLLOSA, Mary McNeil. Born in Alabama. Graduated 
Irving Academy, Mobile. Married, 1895, Ernest F. Fenol- 
losa. Resided in Japan about eight years. Author : Out 
of the Nest: A Flight of Verses, 1899 ; and Child Verses 
on Japanese Subjects. Wrote Monograph upon Heroshige, 
the Artist of Mist, Snow, and Rain ; also verses, sketches, 
and stories in many magazines. 

GUINEY, Louise Imogen. Born Boston, Jan. 7, 1 861. Grad- 
uated Elmhurst Academy, Providence, R. I., 1879. Studied 
afterwards under private tutors and abroad. Contributor 



Biographical Index 349 

since 1885 to Harper's, Atlantic, and other magazines. 
Author: The White Sail and Other Poems, 1887; Mon- 
sieur Henri: A Footnote to French History, 1892; A 
Roadside Harp, 1893; A Little English Gallery, 1894; 
Patrins, essays, 1897; England and Yesterday, 1898; A 
Martyr's Idyl, and Shorter Poems, 1899; Editor James 
Clarence Mangan, His Selected Poems, with Study by the 
Editor, 1897; of the Matthew Arnold (in small Riverside 
Literature Series) ; of Dr. T. W. Parsons' Translation of 
Divina Commedia of Dante, 1893 ; of Henry Vaughn's 
Mount of Olives, 1902. Resides since 1901 in Oxford, 
England. 

HALL, Gertrude. Born Boston, Sept. 8, 1863. Educated 
private schools in Florence, Italy. Author : (verse) Far 
from To-day; Allegretto (light verse) : Foam of the Sea; 
Age of Fairygold ; Translator Paul Verlaine's Poems, 
and of Cyrano de Bergerac: (prose) The Hundred, and 
Other Stories; April's Sowing; The Legend of Sainte 
Cariberte des Ois. Resides New York City. 

HOVEY, Richard. Born Normal, 111., 1864. Educated Dart- 
mouth College. Author: Poems, privately printed, 1880; 
Songs from Vagabondia ; More Songs from Vagabondia ; 
and Last Songs from Vagabondia (in collaboration with 
Bliss Carman) ; Seaward : An Elegy (on the death of 
Thomas William Parsons) ; The Quest of Merlin : A 
Masque ; The Marriage of Guenevere : A Tragedy ; The 
Birth of Galahad; A Romantic Drama; Taliesin : A 
Masque ; Along the Trail : A Book of Lyrics ; Trans- 
lator the Plays of Maeterlinck (in two series). Died 
1900. 

KNOWLES, Frederic Lawrence. Born Lawrence, Mass., 
Sept. 8, 1869. Graduated Wesleyan University, 1894. 
Harvard, 1896. In editorial department Houghton, Mifflin 
and Co., from February to September of 1898. Literary 
adviser of L. C. Page and Co., 1 899-1 900. Since that time 
adviser for Dana Estes and Company. Unmarried. Au- 
thor : (prose) Practical Hints for Young Writers, Readers, 
and Book Buyers, 1897; A Kipling Primer, 1900. (Repub- 
lished in England) ; (verse) On Life's Stairway, 1900; Love 
Triumphant, 1904. Edited Cap and Gown Second Series, 



350 Biographical Index 

1897; Golden Treasury of American Lyrics, 1897; Treas- 
ury Humorous Poetry, 1902; The Famous Children of 
Literature Series, 1902. Resides in Boston. 

PEABODY, Josephine Preston. Born in New York. Edu- 
cated Girls' Latin School, Boston, and at Radcliffe College, 
1894-96. Instructor in English Literature at Wellesley 
College, 1901-03. Author : Old Greek Folk-Stories (River- 
side Lit. Series) 1899; The Wayfarers, a book of verse, 
1898; Fortune and Men's Eyes; New Poems with a 
Play, 1900; Marlowe, A Drama, 1901 ; The Singing 
Leaves, 1903. Contributor to leading magazines. Resides 
Cambridge, Mass. 

REESE, Lizette Woodworth. Born in Baltimore Co., Md., 
Jan. 9, 1856. Teacher of English, West High School, 
Baltimore. Author: A Branch of May; A Handful of 
Lavender, 1891 ; A Quiet Road, 1896. Resides in 
Baltimore. 

ROBERTS, Charles George Douglas. Born Douglas, N. B., 
Jan. 10, i860. Graduated University of New Brunswick, 
1879 (A. M. 1880). Married 1880. Head Master Chatham 
Grammar School, 1879-81 ; York St. School, Fredericton, 
1881-83. Editor Week, Toronto, 1883-84. Professor 
English and French Literature, King's College, Windsor, 
N. S., 1885-88. Professor English and Economics, same, 
1888-95. Associate Editor Illustrated American, 1897-98. 
Author: (verse) Orion and Other Poems, 1880; In Divers 
Tones, 1887; Ave: An Ode for the Shelley Centenary, 
1892; Songs of the Common Day, and Ave, 1893; The 
Book of the Native, 1896; New York Nocturnes, 1898; 
Poems, 1901 ; The Book of the Rose, 1903; (prose) The 
Canadians of Old ; Earth's Enigmas ; The Raid from 
Beausejour ; A History of Canada ; The Forge in the 
Forest; Around the Camp-fire; Reube Dare's Shad 
Boat ; A Sister to Evangeline ; Appleton's Canadian 
Guide-Book, 1899; By the Marshes of Minas, 1900; The 
Heart of the Ancient Wood, 1900 ; The Kindred of the 
Wild, 1902; Barbara Ladd, 1902; The Bird Book, 1903; 
The Watchers of the Trails, 1904. Editor the Alastor and 
Adonais of Shelley with Introduction and Notes, 1902. 
Resides New York City. 



Biographical Index 351 

SANTAYANA, George E. Born in Spain, 1863. Assistant 
Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University. Author: 
(verse) Sonnets and Other Poems, 1894; Lucifer: A The- 
logical Tragedy, 1899; The Hermit of Carmel and Other 
Poems, 1901 ; (prose) The Sense of Beauty, 1896; Inter- 
pretations of Poetry and Religion, 1900. Resides Cam- 
bridge, Mass. 

SCOLLARD, Clinton. Born Clinton, N. Y., Sept. 18, i860. 
Graduated from Hamilton College, 1881. Also studied 
at Harvard and at Cambridge, England. Professor of 
English Literature at Hamilton College, 1888-96. Author: 
(verse) Pictures in Song, 1884; With Reed and Lyre, 
1888; Old and New World Lyrics, 1888; Giovio and 
Giulia, 1891 ; Songs of Sunrise Lands, 1892; The Hills of 
Song, 1895; A Boy's Book of Rhyme, 1896; Skenandoa, 
1896 ; The Lutes of Morn, 1901 ; Lyrics of the Dawn, 1902 ; 
The Lyric Bough, 1904 ; Ballads of Valor and Victory, 
1904 (in collaboration with Wallace Rice) ; Footfarings 
(prose and verse) 1904; (prose) Under Summer Skies, 
1892; On Sunny Shores, 1893; A Man-at-Arms, 1898; 
The Son of a Tory, 1900; A Knight of the Highway; The 
Cloistering of Ursula, 1902; Lawton, 1900; Editor Ford's 
Broken Hearts, 1904, and of Ballads of American Bravery, 
1900. Resides Clinton, N. Y. 

THOMAS, Edith Matilda. Born Chatham, O., August 12, 
1854. Educated Normal School, Geneva, Ohio. Removed 
to New York, 1888. Author : (verse) A New Year's 
Masque and Other Poems, 1885 ; Lyrics and Sonnets, 
1887 ; Babes of the Year, 1888 ; The Inverted Torch, 1890 ; 
Fair Shadow Land, 1893; A Winter Swallow, 1896 ; The 
Dancers, 1903; (prose) The Round Year. Resides West 
New Brighton, Staten Island. 

TORRENCE, Frederic Ridgely. Born Xenia, O., Nov. 27, 
1875. Educated under private tutors and at Miami Uni- 
versity, O., also Princeton. Librarian Astor Library, 
1897-1901. Librarian Lenox Library, 1901-03. At pres- 
ent Associate Editor of The Critic, New York. Unmar- 
ried. Author: (verse) The House of a Hundred Lights, 
1900; El Dorado, A Tragedy, 1903. Resides in New 
York. 



352 



Biographical Index 



UPSON, Arthur. Born in Camden, N. Y., 1877. Graduated 
from Camden Academy, 1894. B. A. University of Min- 
nesota. Author : Poems (with George Norton Northrop) ; 
Westwind Songs (with an Introduction by " Carmen 
Sylva"); Octaves In An Oxford Garden; The City, a 
Poem-Drama (with Introduction by Count Liitzow). Re- 
sides Minneapolis, Minn. 

WOODBERRY, George E. Born Beverly, Mass., May 12, 
1855. Graduated Harvard, 1877. Professor of English 
at University of Nebraska, 1877-78, and 1880-82. On 
editorial staff of the Nation, 1878-79. Author: History 
of Wood Engraving, 1883 ; Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1885 ; 
Studies in Letters and Life, 1890 ; The North Shore Watch 
and Other Poems, 1890; Heart of Man, 1899; Wild Eden, 
1899; Makers of Literature, 1900; Nathaniel Hawthorne, 
1902; Poems (collected edition), 1903. Editor Complete 
Poems of Shelley ; Complete Works of Poe (with Mr. 
Stedman) ; National Studies in American Letters ; Colum- 
bia Studies in Comparative Literature ; Lamb's Essays of 
Elia; Aubrey de Vere's Selected Poems, and Bacon's 
Essays. Editor of the Journal of Comparative Literature. 
From 1 891 to 1903 Professor of Comparative Literature 
at Columbia University. 



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